Why We Still Need Dropbox
Last week, both Google and Microsoft launched cloud file synchronisation services. Together with Apple, three of the biggest players in tech are now competing with the likes of Dropbox and Box.net.
Google’s service, named “Google Drive” (a name I was hoping they would reserve for their exciting autonomous car project), offers tight integration with Google Docs and other Google products such as Picasa, and no doubt with their Chrome OS and Android operating systems in the near future. One of the key selling points of Google Drive is its search facility; they even use OCR to let you search images. You get 5 GB free and can pay for up to 1 TB of space. Crucially, Drive supports sharing files with others, making collaboration on documents much easier. There is support for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS (no Windows Phone).
Microsoft’s SkyDrive has actually been around for a few years but has always been a web-only interface, so despite their initial offering of 25 GB free it was difficult to see how anyone would ever use it if they had to upload files one by one in a browser (I think they knew that too, since now it’s more usable it only offers 7 GB free). SkyDrive also has tight integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem; the upcoming Windows 8 will use it to synchronise data within apps and to keep your settings in the cloud. Office documents can be opened using Office Web Apps and there is support for sharing files too. It supports Windows, macOS, Windows Phone and iOS (no Android).
Apple’s iCloud is rather different. There is no way to use the storage arbitrarily like a folder as you can with the other services mentioned here. Instead, developers use the APIs to build iCloud into their apps. For many people this is fine: most ordinary users just want their documents and photos to be safe and do not care much about the file system underneath. For many (including me), this is a major limitation. It’s great if you own multiple iOS devices (say, an iPhone and an iPad), because your bookmarks, notes and documents will stay in sync. It’s not so great if you want to share a document. There is no way, for example, for two iPad users to work on a spreadsheet using Apple’s Numbers app – it just can’t be done. Of course, Apple have not added support for cloud rival Dropbox to their apps, so I found myself continually emailing a spreadsheet back and forth as if it were 1998. Welcome to the future. The biggest drawback of iCloud is the lack of Windows support. Not that I would be able to open my Pages documents on Windows anyway. However, if you have a Mac and use only Apple’s products, it’s not bad.
So who needs Dropbox?
With all these major players now involved, I’ve read many blogs and comments suggesting “Dropbox is doomed” or that there’s no point in it any more. How wrong they are.
The purpose of these three services is to keep you within an ecosystem. Each has its own small limitations that might seem like a minor inconvenience now, but remember—this is your data, and one day you might decide you no longer want to belong to a particular ecosystem. How easy will it be to move all those gigabytes of data? Dropbox (and other pure‐cloud providers; I just happen to use Dropbox) is not trying to get me to adopt their phone operating system or make it difficult for me to share with a rival. They are just offering cloud synchronisation without the platform politics.