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.
> 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.
Translation: New service growing faster than older established service.
Nearly all of the quotes point to this same truth.
Exactly. Most of these examples seem to be "we've had Dropbox support for a while, and we added Google Drive and more people are setting it up"; my interpretation is "Dropbox users have already configured their accounts".
The real question is: does Dropbox need to compete with Google?
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...
I don't need it to become anything other than what it is in some stupid pissing contest with Google.
I agree that this is the real question. As a commenter in the original article pointed out, Dropbox is a stand alone product and Google Drive is a feature (much like iCloud).
I may be old fashioned but I prefer applications like Dropbox that focus on doing one thing well. I feel Dropbox still does cross platform sync the best.
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?).
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadTranslation: New service growing faster than older established service.
Nearly all of the quotes point to this same truth.
> We should be careful not to draw too strong a conclusion from such a small sample
But they go ahead and do that anyway
> It is early days for both Google Drive and Dropbox
Early days for a company that has been around since about 2007?
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...
I don't need it to become anything other than what it is in some stupid pissing contest with Google.
I may be old fashioned but I prefer applications like Dropbox that focus on doing one thing well. I feel Dropbox still does cross platform sync the best.