5 ms·
Very interesting calculations. I think patio11 also wrote about Dropbox's numbers a little while ago, but I don't remember where. One big omission from the art
by edanm 16y ago
Very interesting calculations. I think patio11 also wrote about Dropbox's numbers a little while ago, but I don't remember where.
One big omission from the article - Dropbox probably gets discounts from Amazon. Obviously we can't know how much, but I assume they're paying even less on storage than is calculated there.
- patio11 16y agoI made a fairly offhanded comment about them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2353418 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2353418 I generally wouldn't suggest using back of the envelope calculations for much of anything, by the way. Dropbox has stupidly attractive unit economics and a proven customer acquisition channel which explodes like whoa. There. That is probably accurate and possibly useful. Dropbox has N% margins, as demonstrated by back-of-envelope calculations? That is perhaps not quite so accurate or useful.
- edanm 16y agoThanks, that's what I was talking about. Back of the envelope calculations aren't necessarily useful, but they're fun. They let you analyze problems and try and think of all the different moving parts that go into building something - that's why they're so popular in hacker circles. The conclusions are probably useless [1], but the debate and analysis is what you take away. [1] I can't remember what it's called, but I remember reading a theory (on Wikipedia) that says that people tend to estimate pretty well when they estimate the multiplication of lots of numbers. Mostly because, on average, they make mistakes in both directions (i.e. half the numbers are too high, half are too low).
- diegob 16y agoI think back-of-the-envelope will at least get you within an order of magnitude of the real numbers, which gives you a reasonable range to make assumptions.