Dropbox and Google Cloud integrations

This is the reason why proprietary cloud services will never be as flexible as traditional programs on our computers. With N cloud services there need to be N^2 integrations to make them all work together. With N desktop programs it is enough if each of them implements a single common API (for example text bast stdin&#x2F;stdout Posix API) to make them all work together.<p>Imagine if &#x27;cat&#x27; and &#x27;sort&#x27; needed to implement a dedicated API to work together, and then &#x27;sed&#x27; would add another one, and &#x27;wc&#x27; another. This is a kind of mess that we see with cloud services integrations.

Google&#x27;s branding continues to confuse me. Isn&#x27;t Google Cloud their AWS competitor, and the thing they&#x27;re talking about in this article called G Suite?

It&#x27;s worth pointing out that BECAUSE Dropbox recently announced their plans to IPO, all media coverage is now viewed in light of what&#x27;s best to prop up their pricing.<p>No surprise that they are including names like Google, Microsoft, and SAP to put a more positive spin on everything.

I don&#x27;t really get why this is that useful. Except maybe the Gmail&#x2F;Dropbox integration. Our office pays for 1) G Suite - from which we use Gmail and Calendar, 2) Dropbox for Business for file storage&#x2F;sync, 3) Office 365 for Word and Excel, and 4) Slack.<p>I would really really like to give my money to one company, except Google Docs&#x2F;Drive sucks (er, doesn&#x27;t meet our use case), Office 365 - Outlook sucks (in comparison to Gmail) as well as whatever the Microsoft file syncing option is (OneDrive?). Our Dropbox for Business comes up for renewal this month and Google and Microsoft&#x27;s file sync stuff isn&#x27;t remotely comparable. Same for Slack vs the Hangouts incarnation of the moment.<p>I primarily blame Google. We are probably paying an extra $500&#x2F;user&#x2F;year because outside of Gmail and Calendar the other G Suite services are pretty awful in comparison to their competition. It is super frustrating.

I would love to move from Google Drive to Dropbox because of syncing issues and the UI&#x2F;UX but the pricing models kills me. I have around 40 GB of stuff I need to be backed up and in cloud so more than the free version that Dropbox offers but not enough to justify the first tier of 2TB. I get plenty of room to grow with the cheapest version of Google Drive.<p>I&#x27;ve been tempted to just suck it up and pay for way more than what I need.

It’s quite unclear what this practically would mean. Some things are getting confusing with Dropbox already. Why for example, can’t I find the “Paper” files, in an actual seperate folder?<p>I’m not sure this is a good thing.<p>Then again I’m quite surprised how incredibly good iCloud syncing is from Apple, it took them years, but it works impeccable - though I know it’s more limited.

This is great for me. I use dropbox for my personal files these days instead of GDrive because there&#x27;s no native linux client for Gdrive. There are some 3rd party ones but they&#x27;re not that great. I&#x27;ve also been moving away from Google Docs and now the only thing I have in my GDrive is a financial sheet for budgeting that I like to access from my phone. I&#x27;ll probably store it on Dropbox now.

That&#x27;s confusing. I&#x27;m a G Suite customer and it comes with either huge or unlimited amount of google drive storage. I can access that storage either through a browser, or with a program from google called &quot;drive file stream&quot; which creates a &#x27;fake&#x27; local file system interface to online storage. Isn&#x27;t that the same as dropbox? Where would dropbox fit in for a G Suite customer?

It&#x27;s clear that the money is in the enterprise business and not their consumer business.<p>The problem for Dropbox is that storage is commoditized. For them to make money, they need to become a collaboration platform. Storage is a necessary (but not sufficient) piece of that. The more important piece for any collaboration platform is identity. When your company is on G-suite&#x2F;Gmail, Google manages identity for you. So it becomes frictionless for other Google products to piggyback on that identity and authenticate you. That&#x27;s what turns a suite of products into a proper collaboration platform.<p>Microsoft and Google have an advantage because they manage email. So I had expected Dropbox will launch a G-suite competitor.<p>If you&#x27;re in the Google ecosystem with G-Suite, I don&#x27;t see why you would want to complicate life by using Dropbox. G-Suite integrates well enough with Google storage. In fact, for $10 per user per month, G-Suite offers unlimited storage.

As someone who has never used Dropbox and has instead typically used Google Drive for doc sharing, could someone who&#x27;s a user of Dropbox provide their perspective on how Dropbox is different and why it would make sense as a G Suite user to use dropbox vs Drive?

I wonder if they&#x27;ll make it easy to attach MULTIPLE Google accounts to your Dropbox accounts. I have 5 at the moment and there would be some real value in Dropbox giving me an easy way to pull things from all of them together.<p>For example, the Dropbox Paper feature of integrating with your calendar to creating meeting notes is great. I&#x27;ve started using it to take all of my meeting notes as well as tracking action items from those meetings. The biggest issue is that I have 1 Dropbox account and I&#x27;m often dropping in links (or calendars) from multiple Google accounts.

What does Dropbox do for me that going all the way over to Google Docs wouldn&#x27;t?

What does this mean for Dropbox Paper?

Is the Dropbox plan to be a better-than-the-default sync provider, something you purchase in addition to the Google Cloud or Office 365 subscription?<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking that it will be hard for Dropbox to grow alone, but I would have expected them to establish closer ties with companies offering complementary services. I see Google Cloud as a quite straight competitor for Dropbox. Teaching Dropbox customers to use services like Google Docs might be risky.

This seems like google is finally coming to terms with reality: (a) docs&#x2F;sheets&#x2F;etc are awesome, (b) drive is an insane piece of crap that has been significantly holding back the impact of (a). I&#x27;m pretty excited about the possibility that we might be able to ditch drive at my company. Definitely will be trying this out.

So with this I would be able to edit Google office docs directly from Dropbox &#x2F; see it in my Dropbox folder?<p>For our startup tagtog.net this is useful because we like having all centralized into our docker folder and so not miss important documents in other services.

If only this was standardized somehow so that in the future users could integrate the features the way they want, not depending on current business partnership set of deals.

As long as my Google data does not leak to Dropbox, this is fine. I am still boycotting Dropbox over the Condelessa Rice.

Right after a news article that they&#x27;ve mostly dropped AWS. Must sting a little for Amazon.

Is this just for Business accounts?<p>Or does G Suite here includes Gmail+Google services?

Can anyone explain why would I ever need to use Dropbox over Google Drive when I already pay for Google Apps for business (and I use GDrive through the official desktop plugin that creates a virtual drive just like dropbox)

Big strategic mistake by Dropbox. Not sure what their differentiation is going to be in 2 years now that they&#x27;ve capitulated to GSuite.<p>Is Dropbox just a hosting company? Why are people still using it?