Google says “we don’t comment on rumor or speculation”, but these articles from WSJ and Info Week claim that they are planning a cloud file sharing service to compete with Dropbox.
Those of you who’ve followed my blog for a while know I LOVE Dropbox, as much or more than all my Apple devices that I use to connect to Dropbox.
So I’m a little intrigued to watch Google as they try to compete in this space. It makes me wonder what would make a loyal user like me switch. Our whole company is so loyal that as we talked last week about migrating our email, calendaring and some other common services we quickly agreed we didn’t want to move off of Dropbox as part of the deal. Case closed.
But what would get me (and our company) to consider it?
- Security. We’ve never had an issue, but Dropbox has had some issues that make me a little nervous. If I believed the Google platform were safer… or the Dropbox platform less safe, that would probably be my number one weakness.
- Flexibility. Dropbox doesn’t allow limiting access by sub-folder. I tend to think this simplicity is part of what makes it work, but I’m sure someone could figure out how to make the access and sharing a little more elegant.
- Cost. Several of us at TE have enough files that we pay the $9.99 a month for extra storage. It is absolutely worth it, but if there were a similar product for cheaper or free, I’d be interested, especially as we grow! Sharepoint has been offered to us for free on top of our other services and we have no interest in that, so “similar product” is key here…
Show us what you’ve got, Google!
