Google Drive Gets a Jump on Dropbox

I thought the article was crap<p>&#62; We should be careful not to draw too strong a conclusion from such a small sample<p>But they go ahead and do that anyway<p>&#62; It is early days for both Google Drive and Dropbox<p>Early days for a company that has been around since about 2007?

I actually want to like Google Drive. It's cheaper and the pricing is clearer, and the sharing works much better than Dropbox's weird "access to shared folders counts against your quota" policy. But the experience kind of sucks. No linux client is a killer straight off (there is a free software "grive" utility which can do on-demand syncing, and it works well enough). The tie-in with docs means that every time I drop a PDF into it the Android app it prompt me to convert it to a Google doc (seriously?).

The operative question here is whether Google is taking Dropbox users, or introducing new users to cloud storage. Assuming Dropbox is still growing, having another player holding the hands of new users might actually be beneficial for Dropbox, because it's easier to get people to switch services for something they're already doing than to get them to do something new.

The real question is: does Dropbox need to compete with Google?<p>To me, Dropbox does everything I need it to do. It's great as a backup in case I lose my local copy, it's fast, it's well-priced, I still have tons of storage left on my account...<p>I don't need it to become anything other than what it is in some stupid pissing contest with Google.

&#62; Attachments.me co-founder and CEO Jesse Miller says that since the company added Google’s service on June 12, it has consistently seen 50 percent more Drive accounts added per day than Dropbox.<p>Translation: New service growing faster than older established service.<p>Nearly all of the quotes point to this same truth.

It would be awesome to have a productivity tool start up today with both and see who "wins". My guess is it would be Dropbox.