
Dropbox for Gmail - dctrwatson
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-gmail-beta/dpdmhfocilnekecfjgimjdeckachfbec
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sz4kerto
There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly
because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if
the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's
going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for
MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google.

Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are
complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the
other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience.
Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.

~~~
yeukhon
I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers
probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't
even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it
first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even
though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came
out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute
as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is
trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using
GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable
iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over
email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used
GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the
PDFs online and offline.

~~~
danieldk
I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more
flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and
downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there
are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully
after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux
there even isn't an official client.

Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files
that you shared and unsharing from there.

I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is
seamless.

That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs
integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in
the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.

~~~
yeukhon
Certainly. Google has plenty of customers signed up for Google Accounts so
users use Google Docs for doc sharing, which eventually means running Box.com
inside Google, offering GDrive. Which reminds of Google Wave as various
technology used in Wave was eventually used in other Google products, most
notably in Google Doc (although Google Doc was a production acquisition).

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api
Won't this result in a lot of duplicate records at the NSA?

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TeMPOraL
Surely they have deduplication capabilities, unless you're implying that the
Utah data center exists solely to deal with people using NPM in their
projects.

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ArekDymalski
Seeing how courageously Dropbox moves into the territory of giants (first
Cloudon, now Google Drive turf) the infamous Jobsian "you're a feature not a
product" seems to be an iconic short-sighted mistake.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for
storage is infinite and free.

Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome
plugin years ago.

In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a
few enterprise customers.

~~~
malchow
"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free"

Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the
techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food
will run out on Earth.

The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior
is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not
predictable. That's why oil could drop 50% in the last 60 days. It's why Paul
Ehrlich and John Malthus were wrong. And why Dropbox could end up being a
truly great company.

When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's
free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb)

~~~
Spooky23
It has an air of truth. Dropbox is bar none the best sync client. Almost
unbelievably so.

But they were in 2010 too. And if you time travelled from 2010 to 2015, you
wouldn't really notice anything materially different between Dropbox then and
now.

~~~
ibrahima
I don't get it either, they have so many competitors and no one seems to
actually bother to compete with Dropbox in the client space. I want to like
Google Drive just because it's cheaper and integrates with Gmail and all the
other Google services I use, but there's still no Linux client and it's just
not as simple as Dropbox. Dropbox is just solid and available everywhere.

~~~
mercer
Perhaps it's harder to make something like Dropbox work? I wouldn't know; just
wondering. Having Guido Van Rossum on board either means that they're doing
hard stuff, or they like hiring overqualified people...

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pbnjay
EDIT: There are some links showing up now with more content. When this was
first posted there was very little to be found to confirm the author... I'll
leave my comment for posterity though.

This doesn't look like it's officially from Dropbox? (I can't find any blog
posts) No thanks.

It looks handy, but I'm not so sure I want to give someone access to my GMail
AND my Dropbox when they can't even tell me who they are OR make it clear that
they are NOT the service provider. Super sketch.

~~~
levialon
This is officially from Dropbox. Check out the developer in the extension
details

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-
gmail-...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-gmail-
beta/dpdmhfocilnekecfjgimjdeckachfbec/related)

~~~
smarx
See also
[https://www.dropbox.com/help/8807](https://www.dropbox.com/help/8807).

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BallinBige
short memories

[http://www.drop-dropbox.com](http://www.drop-dropbox.com)

~~~
brianobush
meh, dirty politics. It is deep in many boards across large companies in the
US. Not going to change anytime soon, regardless of consumer action.

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brongondwana
Meh, we've supported attach from Dropbox natively at FastMail for ages.

[http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/04/09/dropbox-integration-
now-...](http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/04/09/dropbox-integration-now-
available-2/)

~~~
orky56
This is a big deal since it is Dropbox themselves providing more seamless
integration into the actual Gmail web experience. Impact is not just
innovation but the scale in which it's adopted.

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alexandere
I don't understand why dropbox still doesn't have it's own email/messaging
platfrom

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Sophistifunk
If you add enough features to your email client, will it eventually become
Emacs?

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inkwash
Or you can use Ref ([http://refapp.co](http://refapp.co)). Dropbox,
Box.net..it has got it all.

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theseanstewart
I would install this, but only if there was incentive of extra space like
previous promotions :)

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te0x
Why? it's an additional feature for a product you already use.

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JohnLen
Very useful. Thanks Dropbox for the effort of making life easier.

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pritam2020
Yahoo mail already has dropbox integration

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Leibo32
Finally I have both Gdrive and dropbox.

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lurkinggrue
Does not work with Firefox.

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samiryusuf
future plans for firefox?

