Dropbox for Gmail

[sz4kerto]

There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google.

Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience. Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.

[presumeaway]

> a feature, not a productive

That line was so incisive when I first heard it in 2011 that it's stuck with me ever since:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...

Edit: Hey guys, it's the only primary source I could find citing Drew Houston's conversation with Steve Jobs, wherein Steve Jobs stated that Dropbox was a feature, and not a product.

[yeukhon]

I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the PDFs online and offline.

[revorad]

storage is a feature, not a product

This is such a strange strawman argument. Dropbox is not just some dumb storage. You may think syncing across computers and sharing are trivial things, but they are not.

Even if you're right, maybe it's not so bad if your "feature" company makes more money than most other product companies and is heading straight for an IPO.

[digital-rubber]

What is seen as a feature from mickeysofts point of view, is still a proper product from dropbox point of view.

And when will users complaint? When their storage, data is gone/lost etc, so why would mickeysoft even bother to provide storage. Let dropbox take the blame if data goes missing, M$ part worked flawless, it is dropbox that lost your data.

[api]

Won't this result in a lot of duplicate records at the NSA?

[TeMPOraL]

Surely they have deduplication capabilities, unless you're implying that the Utah data center exists solely to deal with people using NPM in their projects.

[ArekDymalski]

Seeing how courageously Dropbox moves into the territory of giants (first Cloudon, now Google Drive turf) the infamous Jobsian "you're a feature not a product" seems to be an iconic short-sighted mistake.

[free2rhyme214]

Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free.

Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome plugin years ago.

In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.

[ecnehw]

Dropbox had yahoo mail integration 2 years ago: https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2013/04/yahoo-mail-dropbox...

[pbnjay]

EDIT: There are some links showing up now with more content. When this was first posted there was very little to be found to confirm the author... I'll leave my comment for posterity though.

This doesn't look like it's officially from Dropbox? (I can't find any blog posts) No thanks.

It looks handy, but I'm not so sure I want to give someone access to my GMail AND my Dropbox when they can't even tell me who they are OR make it clear that they are NOT the service provider. Super sketch.

[levialon]

This is officially from Dropbox. Check out the developer in the extension details

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-gmail-...

[BallinBige]

short memories

http://www.drop-dropbox.com

[brianobush]

meh, dirty politics. It is deep in many boards across large companies in the US. Not going to change anytime soon, regardless of consumer action.

[brongondwana]

Meh, we've supported attach from Dropbox natively at FastMail for ages.

http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/04/09/dropbox-integration-now-...

[orky56]

This is a big deal since it is Dropbox themselves providing more seamless integration into the actual Gmail web experience. Impact is not just innovation but the scale in which it's adopted.

[bornhuetter]

I'm a happy FastMail user, but I think this kind of snark is unprofessional.

[alexandere]

I don't understand why dropbox still doesn't have it's own email/messaging platfrom

[Sophistifunk]

If you add enough features to your email client, will it eventually become Emacs?

[inkwash]

Or you can use Ref (http://refapp.co). Dropbox, Box.net..it has got it all.

[theseanstewart]

I would install this, but only if there was incentive of extra space like previous promotions :)

[te0x]

Why? it's an additional feature for a product you already use.

[JohnLen]

Very useful. Thanks Dropbox for the effort of making life easier.

[pritam2020]

Yahoo mail already has dropbox integration

[Leibo32]

Finally I have both Gdrive and dropbox.

[lurkinggrue]

Does not work with Firefox.

[samiryusuf]

future plans for firefox?