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Dropbox announces partnership with Google Cloud

by Mark Tyson on 2 March 2018, 15:01

Tags: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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Dropbox and Google have announced a new partnership revolving around Dropbox's core functionality and Google's Cloud and popular G Suite of applications. Later this year users will benefit from a trio of headlining integrated features under than banners of centralised content, secure collaboration, and more effective communication.

This initiative has been worked upon to help deliver improved productivity for Dropbox users who also use Google productivity and collaboration tools. Of course Google welcomes the plans, and has helped in the implementations. "Our goal is to make G Suite accessible no matter what tools you bring to work, and these integrations help our shared customers better collaborate in the tools they use every day," explained Ritcha Ranjan, Director, Product Management at Google Cloud. Ranjan added that the integrated Dropbox functionality helped customers focus time on their work rather than technical file saving, resuming, and sharing issues.

The agreement works by delivering the concept of centralised content. "Dropbox users will be able to create, open, edit, save, and share Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides directly from Dropbox. And when you’re working in Dropbox, you’ll be able to save Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to your Dropbox account." Furthermore, collaboration is secure, with Dropbox admins able to manage Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides alongside other Dropbox content.

Google will build new, native Dropbox integrations for Gmail and Google Hangouts Chat for "more effective communication" for Dropbox users. Advanced integration features such as linked file previews, and file attribute info for linked files are promised.

Dropbox recently announced greater integration with Microsoft Outlook and Adobe XD CC, making its cloud storage offering even more attractive.

Google Chrome Music lab

In a not very closely related news nugget, Google Chrome Music Lab's Song Maker is now available. It promises song creation, editing, and collaborative sharing from within your browser. You can use your computer keyboard, midi keyboard, mouse, or voice for note input and there are a number of instruments built-in. The tool doesn't need any login credentials, however while you can load, save and share pieces - there is no export function as yet. Check out the video below for a quick look at the tool in action and its feature set.



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.
aniilv
Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper?
Loss leaders in all likelihood.

Get people on your service and then basically try and ‘lock them in’ by making it hard to leave or make it so they don't want to leave due to having ‘everything there’ and then keep the prices the same or increase etc.
aniilv
Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

Because the operating costs of the facility are considerably greater than the cost of the storage devices.
peterb
Because the operating costs of the facility are considerably greater than the cost of the storage devices.

Okay, but at what point did a breakeven or law of diminishing returns come in to play?

I ask the same question as aniilv only because if you look at the past few years, Google Drive pricing and capacity has stagnated. On the one hand you could argue that the price hasn't gone up either but if you compare the “progress” of the product offering to how it was just a few years before that where online storage capacity was increasing and price decreasing dramatically, what is the reason behind the stagnation?

Specifically relating to data storage - as technology has progressed density has increased massively and other advances have been made as well including power consumption, reliability etc. For the storage company this means that more storage can be put into the same space and use less energy. This must, to some degree, offset increasing costs for things like power and other overheads and considerations?

Put simply I have a 100GB Google Cloud subscription which costs me, I think, £1.79 a month. The jump to the next tier is better value but overkill and you would think they'd offer something in between or have increased the 100GB to 2/300GB by now. But it's just static.
aniilv
Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

i agree with you- i get 5gig free- or subscribe and get a terabyte- ludicrous there`s no middleground.