Dropbox and Google Cloud integrations
blogs.dropbox.com
blogs.dropbox.com
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.
And we can also look at the email example : a lot of cloud provide email services and they all use the same protocols (SMTP, IMAP...).
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.
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?
Also, before SMTP there was UUCP (which was used for both mail and usenet).
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)
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
cross-computer embedding.
e.g. During a conference, drag drop a certain part of UI from a remote computer for real-time demonstration.
Even embed a content into an email and send it to a friend, as long as your computer stays on your friend can open part of your widget.
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?)
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.
Proprietary software suffers from a fundamental flaw that limits its usefulness as a technology. It's a technical problem.
(And posix stdin/out is quite terrible tbh, imagine if cat and sort could emit structured objects like in powershell)
Edit: As well as Google Maps API, Chrome & Android devices.
https://gsuite.google.com/together/?user-benefits_activeEl=t...
on the top left corner you can find "G Suite by Google Cloud"
What's the new Google these days?
No surprise that they are including names like Google, Microsoft, and SAP to put a more positive spin on everything.
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.
And that's what you need to refine products to the next level (or go into billion dollar markets).
It's partially due to the promotion system, partially due to bring allergic to top down management, paired with some arrogance.
Best example are their numerous failed attempts to do payments. Apart from search and ads (which have strong leadership) the examples are legion.
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.
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.
We have a similar situation for a company of ~100 across 4 offices (2 in NA, and 2 in EU)
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
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.
I've been tempted to just suck it up and pay for way more than what I need.
Great. Might just spend the money :)
The last time I tried with OneDrive, Google Drive, or Nextcloud, all choked
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or does G Suite here includes Gmail+Google services?
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).
Frankly, this news excites me.
Is Dropbox just a hosting company? Why are people still using it?