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Google and Box Announce Partnership
- nthitz 10y agoInteresting! Why not Dropbox? How might this impact Google Drive?
- niftich 10y agoBox has always promoted this notion that you can make applications/addons/extensions that use Box as a backing datastore [1]. This was quite obviously a play at the B2B line-of-business market, which could conceivably develop cloud-hosted apps [2] that operate on data that employees upload into Box. This is to the detriment of those who sell traditional desktop-based line-of-business apps, including potentially Microsoft Office. Box could -- for a while now -- open Google Docs documents [3][4] and the like. I guess now it works the other direction, where Google Docs works on files that are sitting in Box? Google Drive, as funny as it sounds, is actually in a different market: they're the catch-all storage space for Google stuff, while at the same time marketed at nothing in particular. Meanwhile Box aggressively goes after the 'medium business' market. From this odd partnership, a realistic competitor to Microsoft and other office-y application makers may result. [1] http://readwrite.com/2013/06/06/box-pay-developers-based-on-app-usage/ http://readwrite.com/2013/06/06/box-pay-developers-based-on-... [2] https://app.box.com/services/browse/57 https://app.box.com/services/browse/57 [3] https://blog.box.com/blog/how-to-use-google-docs-in-box/ https://blog.box.com/blog/how-to-use-google-docs-in-box/ [4] https://blog.box.com/blog/box-and-google-docs-accelerating-the-cloud-workforce/ https://blog.box.com/blog/box-and-google-docs-accelerating-t...
- noahmbarr 10y agoWe use Google and Box for work at a 100 person Series C startup. Searching across all the locations for my files is a disaster : - one Local files on my work laptop (mostly synced via dropbox), - two Box (mostly in their web UI, with ~2 folders being "synced" locally), - three Google Drive (shared and authored files a like), - four Email, - five Slack, - six Files stuck in our business systems (like contracts that sit in Salesforce.com, Jira, etc) It's an absolute mess. I can't imagine I'm the only one to be annoyed and losing productivity.
- peterjlee 10y agoThere are companies that solve exactly that. Xendo and Synata are the two I know. They've both been acquired earlier this year.
- zyxley 10y agoSounds like we need a startup to connect the services of all these other startups together.
- navs 10y agoBut then some companies won't play ball with their own storage services e.g. iCloud.
- kuschku 10y agoThen just reverse their official apps and call the same API yourself
- Nullabillity 10y agoThere's nothing unique about iCloud, so just go with another provider that's less awful?
- gwulf 10y agohttps://www.meta.sc https://www.meta.sc
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- grizzles 10y agoI like Aaron Levie too. But my thoughts on this can be summarized by quoting one of the responses to the blog post: Why use Box and not just use Drive?
- CPAhem 10y agoDrive has many reliability issues at a scale of over a few thousand files [1]. Perhaps Box is more reliable? [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/drive https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/drive
- rayvd 10y agoYep. I have 5000+ files in Box. We have users with far more (and it supports very large file sizes -- 15GB I think today?). Sync client has improved quite a bit over the years.
- foolfoolz 10y agoGoogle drive is terrible for shared directory structures. it's not that box is better than drive, everyone is better than drive at organizing files
- xapata 10y agoI'm fed up with complex director y hierarchies. Namespaces are cool and all, but flat is better than nested.
- enraged_camel 10y agoFlatness can result in much more overwhelming complexity.
- xapata 10y agoI suppose that depends on what you mean by complexity. I prefer lists to trees, in general. After I reorganized my Dropbox into only 1 layer of folders, I've found it much easier to navigate. But hey, that's just my anecdote.
- tgarma1234 10y agoSort of thought that anything you put in Drive belongs to or can be used by Google according to their TOS. Correct me if I am wrong but that is the main reason no rational business would ever connect anything to Google if they can avoid doing so.
- grahamburger 10y agoI believe if you purchase Google Apps (like most businesses would) the TOS are different. EDIT: In case any one is curious, this page links to both: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en
- Oletros 10y agoThe content doesn't belongs to Google and the permissions granted are the standard for any service that displays or modifies the content.
- mahdix 10y agoIs this star of the end of Google Drive?
- TheDale 10y agoWell, the new users might want to keep their files hosted where they already are. I have Box account, but not much files there, my primary cloud storage is gDrive, but you know, people might have Box accounts with those 50GB that OEMs gave away with devices ;)
- mxuribe 10y agoAt my day job we are asked to use Box (enterprise), and while it is ok (not great, but not totally awful) as a solution for sharing/distributing files for both internal and external recipients (avoiding those emails with huge attachments)...It absolutely sucks at searching for your files. I starting using tags - similar to Gmail's excellent labels - with the hopes of finding my files without getting a ton of irrelevant stuff...but no dice. Searching for files in Box still so often brings up irrelevant files as to be counter-productive. Again, Box has its benefits, but point blank, search is broken within Box...which means for my team and I to find things we can not depend on search (or tags/labels)...which means we have to depend on old school folder hierarchies; and all the potential downsides that it brings. My hope is this partnership DOES bring some of google's search prowess into the Box product.
- cptskippy 10y agoI seem to regularly have problems with Gmail's searching. Searching for an email composed and sent on a device other than the one you're using to search is a crap shoot. I don't know if it's sync issues but I've had a lot of trouble trying to find emails I know I sent only to open another device and find them.
- mxuribe 10y agoI have not had that experience. However i will state thaT what really augmented my searching within gmail (both from desktop and mobile) is using the search operators. Admittedly i only use 2 or 3 of them, but even just those few provide so much power in really filtering down to the relevant emails. Check out the following reference: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en I had read an older version of this, but i'm sure this version will suffice to help you. Good luck!
- zachlatta 10y agoHave you made sure that your devices are putting emails sent from them in the right folder? I had this issue for a while and it turned out that my phone made it's own "Sent" folder in addition to Gmail's existing one, which completely screwed up search.
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoIt'll be interesting to see what Dropbox does in response to this. Box has always been the "business" solution, but partnering up with Google positions Box better to build on this. I feel like this is really bad news for Dropbox who has been trying to get into the business market, but are clearly failing.
- baristaGeek 10y agoIPO once and for all?
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoBox? Yes. Dropbox? Eh.
- newgre 10y agoIt drives me nuts to read an announcement regarding $some_product when they don't spend a single word on explaining what the hell $some_product actually is. What the hell Google PR??? disclaimer: I work at Google :|