
Dropbox and Google Cloud integrations - ublaze
https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2018/03/google-cloud-integrations/
======
mixedbit
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/stdout Posix API) to make them all work together.

Imagine if 'cat' and 'sort' needed to implement a dedicated API to work
together, and then 'sed' would add another one, and 'wc' another. This is a
kind of mess that we see with cloud services integrations.

~~~
cdancette
Why couldn't cloud providers adopt a common API? Some providers are adopting
AWS apis for their services.

And we can also look at the email example : a lot of cloud provide email
services and they all use the same protocols (SMTP, IMAP...).

~~~
jolmg
Because they want to lock their customers to their platform. AWS has the
biggest marketshare, so if a smaller provider adopts AWS's api, that means
that AWS customers can easily migrate to them.

I do wonder how we managed to get standard protocols adopted for email. What
did email providers use before SMTP and IMAP? Maybe the key difference then
from now was that the internet community was much smaller? Did Mark Crispin
simply write the RFC for IMAP, email vendors noticed on their own, and adopted
the protocol? Or was the emailing community then so small that there were no
vendors and it was really just a handful of programmers, who could discuss and
agree on protocols via something like Usenet and implement their own clients
and servers?

~~~
philsnow
more the latter. long ago, to get access to mail or usenet you generally were
a technically minded person at one of a few universities or large corporations
like DEC. to give a sense of the scale involved, check out
[http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/](http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/)
. There were on the order of between dozens and hundreds of machines, and you
would send mail to a person on a given machine by figuring out (by hand?) a
path from your machine to that machine and include the names of all the
machines in a "bang path" [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-
path.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html)

Also, before SMTP there was UUCP (which was used for both mail and usenet).

------
notatoad
Google's branding continues to confuse me. Isn't Google Cloud their AWS
competitor, and the thing they're talking about in this article called G
Suite?

~~~
azurezyq
G Suite is a product series part of Google Cloud.

[https://gsuite.google.com/together/?user-
benefits_activeEl=t...](https://gsuite.google.com/together/?user-
benefits_activeEl=tab-connect)

on the top left corner you can find "G Suite by Google Cloud"

~~~
rvo
This naming is ridiculous. Did they hire a bunch of Microsoft people ?

~~~
huangbong
Google naming products at this point is just memes. But it proves that if you
have an amazing enough product (G suite) the name doesn’t matter at all.
Whoever came up with G suite is just a bad person though ugh.

~~~
webkike
I'm all against rigid company culture, but google naming needs to be improved.
Variables are consistently named better at google than the products they are
written for.

~~~
notatoad
The naming doesn't even need to be improved, they just need to stop with the
renaming. GSuite is an awful name, but i know what it means at this point as
long as they don't sometimes call it "Google Cloud" instead.

~~~
scrollaway
G Suite has been called in the past "Google for Work", "Google Enterprise",
"Google Business", "Google Apps", "Google Apps for Business", "Google Apps for
Work", and I probably forget some more. It's really insane.

------
canistr
It's worth pointing out that BECAUSE Dropbox recently announced their plans to
IPO, all media coverage is now viewed in light of what's best to prop up their
pricing.

No surprise that they are including names like Google, Microsoft, and SAP to
put a more positive spin on everything.

------
nkw
I don't really get why this is that useful. Except maybe the Gmail/Dropbox
integration. Our office pays for 1) G Suite - from which we use Gmail and
Calendar, 2) Dropbox for Business for file storage/sync, 3) Office 365 for
Word and Excel, and 4) Slack.

I would really really like to give my money to one company, except Google
Docs/Drive sucks (er, doesn'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's file sync stuff isn't remotely comparable. Same for
Slack vs the Hangouts incarnation of the moment.

I primarily blame Google. We are probably paying an extra $500/user/year
because outside of Gmail and Calendar the other G Suite services are pretty
awful in comparison to their competition. It is super frustrating.

~~~
crsv
I feel like the GSuite product experiences outside of Mail and Calendar still
feel really unrefined for a company of the size, scale, and capability of
Google. They've had the opportunity to absolutely crush the productivity /
work suite of apps, and yet somehow for all their resources and prowess,
they've not been able to produce products that are truly _compelling_ options
vs Office and Slack. Maybe there's a "yet" at the end of that, but as time
marches on, it feels less likely for some reason.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Are you including gDocs and gSheets in that? They seem adequately polished to
me (I know the serious Excel user won't be switching any time soon, but for
lots of "just put it in a spreadsheet" uses gSheets is fine). And of course
time will tell if they have managed to finally make a Slack-killer with
Hangouts Chat[1].

1:
[https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/)

~~~
nkw
The primary roadblock for us is gDocs. Sheets would probably meet our needs
because spreadsheet aren't really a core need, however word
processing/documents are our lifeblood. While gDocs has improved it doesn't
come close to Word for us. It isn't just that it is a web app -- the Office
365 web based Word actually would be usable for us vs. the desktop apps. That
fact is actually pretty amazing to me, I would not have anticipated that to
ever be the case when Microsoft first put out their web based version of Word.
As it happens a while back I mentioned on here one of the big bugs/lack
features that kept us from using the web based Word and some guy from
Microsoft asked for more details and then the issue was resolved a few weeks
later. That was pretty surprising and impressive to me.

I have no doubt Google has the talent and ability to make Docs competitive,
but for some reason it is just not a priority for them.

I'm going to look at Hangouts Chat, but we had a particularly painful process
(for no technological reason) when we migrated from using Hangouts for IM to
Slack and I don't really look forward to the eye-rolls that are going to come
with "Remember Hangouts? We're going back..." even if the Hangouts Chat is an
entirely different product. But that is our issue.. Kudos to Google if it can
eliminate the need for Slack.

------
SnowingXIV
I would love to move from Google Drive to Dropbox because of syncing issues
and the UI/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.

I've been tempted to just suck it up and pay for way more than what I need.

~~~
bloudermilk
I'd argue that what you need is not 40GB of storage, it's _enough_ storage and
a great service. To me, paying $8.25/mo is a no-brainer for the quality and
reliability of the service alone. Having enough storage space so that I never
have to think twice about uploading something is just a nice bonus.

~~~
SnowingXIV
The only thing holding me back is I'd probably have to pay for both since I
use Drive for a daily NAS scheduled backup for business purposes. Looks like I
can now do that with Dropbox as well.

Great. Might just spend the money :)

------
5_minutes
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?

I’m not sure this is a good thing.

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.

~~~
gordon_freeman
I think what this means is an integration with Google Drive in Dropbox itself.
You might need to connect your Google account with Dropbox (by allowing
permission of course) and can then able to access GDrive files in Dropbox or
create a Docs/Slide/Sheet from within Dropbox which will in turn save it in
Dropbox and GDrive both. At least that's what I am getting from this
announcement.

------
usuallymatt
This is great for me. I use dropbox for my personal files these days instead
of GDrive because there's no native linux client for Gdrive. There are some
3rd party ones but they're not that great. I'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'll probably store it on
Dropbox now.

~~~
johnsmith99
Google Drive always fails to sync correctly on my Macbook as well, unlike
Dropbox.

~~~
neolefty
Is that the old client? Yes, it was never great for me either.

I had an alert to switch to "Google Drive File Stream" (and uninstall the old
Google Drive client) that is some kind of virtual filesystem. I went ahead and
did it but haven't used it much yet.

~~~
wcfields
I found out about File Stream by accident, they haven't really pushed it.

~~~
askvictor
It's only for g-suite (i.e. corporate) users, not personal accounts. It's up
to your g-suite admin to push it. I've been using it for a few months and it's
pretty good.

------
elago
That's confusing. I'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 "drive file stream"
which creates a 'fake' local file system interface to online storage. Isn't
that the same as dropbox? Where would dropbox fit in for a G Suite customer?

~~~
kody
I'm in the same boat with my organization. My guess is that you'll be able to
store the .gdoc 'files' in Dropbox and opening them will open the docs in your
web browser, just like Drive File Stream.

I'm also curious how this will work with things like Team Drives. You cannot
copy a folder from one Team Drive to another (unless you're a domain admin,
and even then the folder's URL changes), for example.

------
putlake
It's clear that the money is in the enterprise business and not their consumer
business.

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/Gmail,
Google manages identity for you. So it becomes frictionless for other Google
products to piggyback on that identity and authenticate you. That's what turns
a suite of products into a proper collaboration platform.

Microsoft and Google have an advantage because they manage email. So I had
expected Dropbox will launch a G-suite competitor.

If you're in the Google ecosystem with G-Suite, I don'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.

~~~
fh973
You might be interested in this Stratechery article then that looks at Box vs
Dropbox:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883)

------
crsv
As someone who has never used Dropbox and has instead typically used Google
Drive for doc sharing, could someone who'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?

~~~
kody
I moved from Drive to Dropbox as part of my plan to become less reliant on
Google's ecosystem and start self hosting and/or paying for online services.

I've stuck with Dropbox for a while because it's easy to set up, portable, the
iOS app is fantastic, and I _feel_ like my data isn't being siphoned off to
advertisers.

~~~
usuallymatt
Same. I was a kool-aid drinking Google fanboy but started looking elsewhere a
couple years ago. I found myself using Google products just because they were
Google. Part brand loyalty and also it was nice to just have one account for
everything. After a while I admitted to myself that there were better
products. Deezer is awesome and I like it much better than Google Music, I've
been on Firefox for a year now and much prefer it to Chrome (tried switching
back just to see if Chrome had made any changes and I was back on Firefox in
24 hours). I prefer Simplenote to Keep and, other than my one spreadsheet in
Google Docs I use Libre Office locally for my other docs/sheets.

The other thing I've noticed is how fickle Google is with their products,
either not advancing them or straight up killing them. I used to use Listen
for Podcasts and Reader for RSS and got disheartened when those were killed
off. Dropbox is my latest switch, hell I even use DuckDuckGo more these days,
too. The only Google products I can see myself using long term are Gmail (with
my Google Apps Domain account) and Photos. Also, Maps is still the best Maps
software. Other than that I don't use their services much at all these days.

------
brightball
I wonder if they'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.

For example, the Dropbox Paper feature of integrating with your calendar to
creating meeting notes is great. I'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'm often dropping in links
(or calendars) from multiple Google accounts.

------
joelrunyon
What does Dropbox do for me that going all the way over to Google Docs
wouldn't?

~~~
danieldk
Far better file synchronisation (peer to peer LAN sync, partial file sync,
file requests). And you are the customer, not the product, to repeat a cliche.

~~~
skrowl
I had the opposite impression. Dropbox sync was constantly making conflict
files while Google Drive Sync (now replaced by File Stream) was able to more
gracefully determine which file was newer. File stream adds the benefit of
just keeping a stub file on all of my machines, then not actually downloading
the file until I need it (you can, of course, specify which folders to always
keep a downloaded copy of).

~~~
pedro2
File Stream is for Business account only (G Suite). Dropbox Sync is also for
paying individual customers (Dropbox Professional tier, not Dropbox Plus).

That being said, I had conflicts with Dropbox when opening a Visual Studio
solution on a directory mapped through a junction point, which made me unsure
about how reliable is their filessystem driver.

------
samfriedman
What does this mean for Dropbox Paper?

------
jpalomaki
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?

I'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.

------
eagsalazar2
This seems like google is finally coming to terms with reality: (a)
docs/sheets/etc are awesome, (b) drive is an insane piece of crap that has
been significantly holding back the impact of (a). I'm pretty excited about
the possibility that we might be able to ditch drive at my company. Definitely
will be trying this out.

------
juanmirocks
So with this I would be able to edit Google office docs directly from Dropbox
/ see it in my Dropbox folder?

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.

~~~
danieldk
Indeed, it will be interesting to see how this works, since on with Google
Docs the documents are not actually stored on Google Drive (just a
placeholder/link that opens Google Docs when you open it). I would expect that
this works there same, because so far there are no Google Docs file formats.

It should also be noted that Dropbox already had Office Online support for a
while, which allows one to edit Office files that are stored in Dropbox in
Office Online. This integration stores the actual Word/Excel/PowerPoint
documents on Dropbox, so after syncing you have these files locally as well.

~~~
sseth
Google apps (now GSuite) has had offline functionality for several years. You
can work on Sheets, Docs etc completely offline.

~~~
danieldk
Sure, but that’s not the same as: the documents end up as regular files in a
directory in a standard(ized) format, that you still can open in 10 years long
after you cancel your subscription/account.

One of the huge benefits of Dropbox was that _everything_ ends up as a normal
file on your hard disk, that you can archive/backup. Unfortunately, that is
not really true anymore, since Dropbox Paper docs are not saved to Dropbox.

You can save a copy of a Google Docs document on your drive in a Microsoft
Office format, but that goes in one direction.

------
polskibus
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.

~~~
askvictor
Do you mean like an API?
[https://developers.google.com/drive/](https://developers.google.com/drive/)

~~~
polskibus
I mean a standardized protocol that could allow such integrations with any
cloud provider. API is just an implementation.

~~~
askvictor
I struggle to see the difference. Describe what your proposal would look like.

------
newuser94303
As long as my Google data does not leak to Dropbox, this is fine. I am still
boycotting Dropbox over the Condelessa Rice.

------
reificator
Right after a news article that they've mostly dropped AWS. Must sting a
little for Amazon.

~~~
varenc
from the article, it doesn't sound like Dropbox is actually using any of
Google's infrastructure. It seems to be an a set of integrations with
Gmail/Hangouts and G-Suite

~~~
reificator
I didn't say they were. Just that right after dropping AWS they go public with
a collaboration with one of AWS' competitors.

------
pedro2
Is this just for Business accounts?

Or does G Suite here includes Gmail+Google services?

------
orliesaurus
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)

~~~
jvagner
Clients, partners, departments... people can barely ever agree on a single
platform.

I'm a WFH digital nomad (I know, but, as we travel around a lot but mostly HQ
ourselves from the home-office...) with clients, and my partner has her mix of
clients, some of them are shared, and we both have a few different/overlapping
businesses that interface with our respective clients & vendors via different
platforms.

We use Adobe CC, Microsoft 365, G Suite (G Drive), Dropbox, Slack, etc.

Our non-technical clients overwhelming prefer Dropbox, and can't figure out G
Drive's weirdnesses, even if they're G Suite organizations. Dropbox is way
friendlier and more normal in non-technical businesses.

(For our core business, we're as G oriented as possible, plus Adobe CC).

Frankly, this news excites me.

------
fictionfuture
Big strategic mistake by Dropbox. Not sure what their differentiation is going
to be in 2 years now that they've capitulated to GSuite.

Is Dropbox just a hosting company? Why are people still using it?

