Sync is Hard
2012-03-15 08:53:12
I love reading Cringely. He's a fantastic writer, and has some brilliant insights and perspectives.
Now and then, he says things that are so spectacularly uninformed that it's hard to tell if he's just trolling.
In this recent article, for instance, he says:
It's sync that DropBox has right now and Kindle/Amazon does not, but how hard can it be to add that capability?
Sync is one of those things that seems easy. Most programmers can implement sync in no time at all. But that implementation will break down in horrible, data-destroying, panic-inducing ways in Real Life.
Sync is hard, and if you don't understand that, you haven't really been paying attention, and you don't understand what DropBox has pulled off.