Google and Box Announce Partnership

We use Google and Box for work at a 100 person Series C startup.<p><i>Searching across all the locations for my files is a disaster</i> : - one Local files on my work laptop (mostly synced via dropbox), - two Box (mostly in their web UI, with ~2 folders being &quot;synced&quot; locally), - three Google Drive (shared and authored files a like), - four Email, - five Slack, - six Files stuck in our business systems (like contracts that sit in Salesforce.com, Jira, etc)<p>It&#x27;s an absolute mess. I can&#x27;t imagine I&#x27;m the only one to be annoyed and losing productivity.

Box has always promoted this notion that you can make applications&#x2F;addons&#x2F;extensions that use Box as a backing datastore [1]. This was quite obviously a play at the B2B line-of-business market, which could conceivably develop cloud-hosted apps [2] that operate on data that employees upload into Box.<p>This is to the detriment of those who sell traditional desktop-based line-of-business apps, including potentially Microsoft Office.<p>Box could -- for a while now -- open Google Docs documents [3][4] and the like. I guess now it works the other direction, where Google Docs works on files that are sitting in Box?<p>Google Drive, as funny as it sounds, is actually in a different market: they&#x27;re the catch-all storage space for Google stuff, while at the same time marketed at nothing in particular. Meanwhile Box aggressively goes after the &#x27;medium business&#x27; market. From this odd partnership, a realistic competitor to Microsoft and other office-y application makers may result.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readwrite.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;06&#x2F;box-pay-developers-based-on-app-usage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readwrite.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;06&#x2F;box-pay-developers-based-on-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.box.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;browse&#x2F;57" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.box.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;browse&#x2F;57</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.box.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-use-google-docs-in-box&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.box.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-use-google-docs-in-box&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.box.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;box-and-google-docs-accelerating-the-cloud-workforce&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.box.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;box-and-google-docs-accelerating-t...</a>

I like Aaron Levie too. But my thoughts on this can be summarized by quoting one of the responses to the blog post:<p><pre><code> Why use Box and not just use Drive?</code></pre>

At my day job we are asked to use Box (enterprise), and while it is ok (not great, but not totally awful) as a solution for sharing&#x2F;distributing files for both internal and external recipients (avoiding those emails with huge attachments)...It absolutely sucks at searching for your files. I starting using tags - similar to Gmail&#x27;s excellent labels - with the hopes of finding my files without getting a ton of irrelevant stuff...but no dice. Searching for files in Box still so often brings up irrelevant files as to be counter-productive. Again, Box has its benefits, but point blank, search is broken within Box...which means for my team and I to find things we can not depend on search (or tags&#x2F;labels)...which means we have to depend on old school folder hierarchies; and all the potential downsides that it brings. My hope is this partnership DOES bring some of google&#x27;s search prowess into the Box product.

It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what Dropbox does in response to this. Box has always been the &quot;business&quot; solution, but partnering up with Google positions Box better to build on this. I feel like this is really bad news for Dropbox who has been trying to get into the business market, but are clearly failing.

Interesting! Why not Dropbox? How might this impact Google Drive?

It drives me nuts to read an announcement regarding $some_product when they don&#x27;t spend a single word on explaining what the hell $some_product actually is. What the hell Google PR???<p>disclaimer: I work at Google :|

Is this star of the end of Google Drive?

Sort of thought that anything you put in Drive belongs to or can be used by Google according to their TOS. Correct me if I am wrong but that is the main reason no rational business would ever connect anything to Google if they can avoid doing so.