Comment Adding the missing link (Score 1) 492
I think what a lot of folks here are doing is jumping on the whole "OMGWTFGOOGLESTOLEMYBASEBALL" bandwagon. The reality is, if google's solution is even marginally good at syncing and sharing files (which it appears to be with my limited usage), it has potentially the missing link of a pretty damned good documents toolbox for text, spreadsheet, and presentations.
But let's back up here for a second. Ever since Google has had a documents platform from January 2010 on, they've been in want of an *easy* way to get your documents there. Sure, you could go in, upload them, and then pull them back out later, but that was cumbersome and annoying. You could email them to yourself, but again - cumbersome and annoying. They FINALLY added this ability - and just took a baby step forward to make it a "cloud drive" for all of your documents. Not that big of a deal for them, but a hell of a lot more useful to the average Joe.
I do understand that Dropbox has been around for a while - since 2007 in fact. But they never really picked up until the 2009 timeframe for the average user, and while they've been pretty innovative on the synchronizing front, they've not really expanded out very far. Not to mention, they have a bit of a strange market - They tout themselves as a sort of sharing and backup solution. However, the only reason there even needs to be a "sharing" solution is because emailing larger files can be inconsistent but the means to do so with Dropbox isn't particularly elegant even as they add features to make it easier. And to consider dropbox as a means to "back up" your documents is a bit of a joke when there are far superior services that don't try to get into the "sharing" market (and can therefore create a much better backup solution) that are quite a lot cheaper. I'm looking at you, Crashplan and similar services. Because when I want to back up my computer offsite, I don't want to pick a quite limited-capacity folder to do so.
So really, Dropbox is only particularly better than the competition at sharing files. But as I said, it's not even quite great at that. If Google can step up and put out a product that integrates with email for their millions of users (it does), integrates with Google Docs to persuade people to jump into the cloud documents market (it does), and can not lose your data (Google seems to be pretty good at this) - I'd say that's a *good* thing. Hell, it may even convince Dropbox to continue innovating. And isn't that the idea of free enterprise in the first place?