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.
In the Windows world, OLE and COM did things that you can only dream of in the Cloud world.
OLE[0] allowed one application to embed content from another application, without needing to know anything about the other application. It even had facilities to sort-of merge the UIs, so if you were editing a CorelDRAW drawing within your Excel spreadsheet you'd get a subset of the CorelDRAW toolbars and menus within your Excel window. All of this was done at runtime - there was no special programming in Excel to embed a CorelDRAW object.
This stuff actually worked and worked surprisingly well. It's unfortunate that we seem to have lost this.
I don't think we'll ever see this happen to the same extent. The only integrations will be ones that are specifically approved and developed, all N^2 of them.
This is what we're working on at Horbito. The Internet is clearly broken, it wasn't designed for this cases and now the are big players trying to monopolize with their suites. We've created a campaign explaining this problem to sensitize the users: https://www.theinternetisbroken.io
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?
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/ . 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
Also, before SMTP there was UUCP (which was used for both mail and usenet).
I agree with the profit/control motivations the other posters mention, but there are other less anti-users reason as well.
Agreeing on a common API mostly locks you into the common denominator of features. It becomes much harder to ship new capabilities to your customers if you also have to add those features to this standardized interface and get all the stakeholders to move forward with it. All these platforms have some features that their competitors lack and it'd be quite the challenge to expose each platform's unique features in a standardized API.
Email (IMAP/SMTP) is a success story of a widely adopted standard, but it's also something that has barely changed in the last 15-20 years partially as a result of its standardization. You can tell IMAP
is cumbersome to the modern developer. For example, you'll have an easier time working with a gmail account by using the gmail REST API instead of trying to use IMAP. (IMAP has more limited search support, lower-level thread support, and less specific support for syncing clients)
They probably could, but it isn't happening. It is hard to find a cloud service that seamlessly works with some other cloud service without explicit integration between the two services.
Email was introduced and has become a popular standard long before commercial cloud services. The companies adopted it, but they do not seem to be interested in introducing similar standard protocols for new APIs.
Agreed! Making all your API calls to Kloudless (or cloud elements, cloudrail, etc...) instead of individual services is certainly nicer for the developer, but creates another for-profit entity that's just in the middle of it all.
To really be like email we'd be talking about a common protocol that all the service providers implement so software can speak to all providers directly in the same way without a middleman. (A better WebDAV with industry support?)
Well, there have been attempts to create single standards (e.g. CMIS, in the content management space). A lot of the time, enabling the right workflow for the integration to be useful involves providing capabilities that quickly diverge from any common standard that is agreed on. Tying together different business stacks involves a lot more than just establishing API endpoints for individual actions.
Having a single API reduces this inevitable maintenance overhead and swaps out some set of N integrations in favor of one other. There is the added benefit of having a resource (Kloudless, in this case) assist with enabling whichever use case the business is trying to solve for their users by providing the integrations.
I think the real problem is that cloud services relieved some of the pressure to invent standard file formats. And then greedy companies wanted to be walled gardens, rather than integrating with each other.
But when propriety cloud services WANT to work together, they need to come up with standard file (or stream) formats. When they do, integration is often not that hard.
That argument only holds when cloud services do not adopt a common API between each other. (The GDPR might change it since it demands data portability in a common format)
(And posix stdin/out is quite terrible tbh, imagine if cat and sort could emit structured objects like in powershell)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's a deliberate strategy. Microsoft does it as well. By blurring the line between pure consumer apps, business apps and their PaaS/IaaS services. So there sales team can say "You have G Suite? Then you're already a cloud customer! Why not add Firebase and Cloud SQL to your plan?" It gives an illusion of seamless integration.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
Is it possible the "movers" (individuals with the passion, drive, skillset, etc. to push a product forward) avoid GSuite and similar projects like the plague? Google undoubtedly has a lot of talent at their disposal, what are they working on? GCP? Cars?
Strange that you're downvoted. Everyone I know is in the same position.
Office 365 for Office apps because they are standard and available offline.
GSuite for better email, calendar and web-based real-time collaboration.
Slack because it has the most integrations at this point.
Box (or Dropbox) for file syncing because their apps are nicer and faster, although Dropbox controls are subpar compared to Box. Both will exist for a long time since OneDrive is utter crap and GSuite Drive File Stream is extremely slow and unreliable.
Can you explain what's crappy about OneDrive. I've not used dropbox much but it looked/worked similar to onedrive. Just trying to understand the problems I'm unable to recognize by not using dropbox
I own and use Office365 home edition as well as Business Essentials account and use OneDrive from both accounts
OneDrive does nothing well. The syncing app is incredibly slow to pickup changes, often stalls or results in conflicts, and the MacOS version is much worse than the Windows version. The web UI is built from parts of Sharepoint and is slow and unintuitive.
Things have improved in the last year but you would have to use the other apps to really see the difference. Dropbox is still ahead of the others in terms of syncing tech with apps that reliably update changes within seconds. I can save a file and have the latest status reflected by the time I switch over to my browser and refresh the web UI.
Thank you for the insight. I will give dropBox a try.
I currently don't have automatic Syncing enabled on my desktop which explains why I could not see Onedrive the way you did.
Not much beyond looking at the product pages. The only piece of Office 365 that we are in love with is Word. Slack is the choice right now for us because we can use G Suite as our identity provider for SSO and the Slack integrations that are available for other products we use as well as our internal system.
The effort barrier just to get Office 365 to use G Suite for SSO keeps us from seriously deploying any of the other Office 365 features. It seems MS has made setting that up particularly annoying while almost all other app/providers have made it blissfully simple. We would probably be more likely to move to the new Hangouts Chat as a slack replacement, just because we are much more likely to continue to use Gmail/Calendar vs ever moving to Outlook 365/Exchange.
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.
Pay if it's a good deal for what you need. It doesn't hurt you to have free space. Surely you wouldn't find the deal more attractive if today's 2TB price was only for 100GB.
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.
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.
Somewhat unrelated question, but do git repos actually sync properly? I used to work there (not on destkop sync) and if I recall correctly, DVCSs were pretty much explicitly contraindicated. I feel like you'd get a gigantic mess of conflicted copies if you tried.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Dropbox is simpler, has easier setup, less features, and in my experience a more reliable/quicker on-disk sync client. Google Drive has quite poor UX, which puts a lot of people off.
I use Google Drive, but I can see the appeal of Dropbox for someone who doesn't need Drive's web UI features and extras and just want something that works.
For me the main feature is that Dropbox is less confusing about where files and folders actually are. And has simpler sharing settings.
Now, with Team Drives and File Stream Goolge is catching up and of course Google Docs have no equivalent in Dropbox. (Dropbox paper is very limited). But Team Drives have very weird limits (max 20 subfolders deep, max 250000 files)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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).
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.