That's not too unlikely, if by "Drive" you mean the desktop sync application, which pretty clearly has always been pretty tangential to the strategic purpose of Drive, which is first and foremost a cloud storage platform for web apps (Google first-party apps, institutional customer second-party apps, and ISV third-party apps).
So I trust that Dropbox _will_ be out of business very soon.
while I agree with you in principle, there's also quite a lot more people who simply are happy (relieved, even) that they can make the computer help them perform the task they want to accomplish. I'm not even saying that Dropbox or Google is better at this, just that I see people use every day just what's right in front of them and they know they can make work. and because of that they don't seem to have the luxury (even if they have the foresight) of considering what will stick around for longest (or perhaps what's idealistically "right" to choose).
again, I'm not defending this situation. but it does seem (to me) that the majority of people are motivated by this, and cannot afford or consider decisions like whether or not to "simply not trust Google".
Google's advantage is that they can slowly eat away at Dropbox's market share by integrating Google Drive with and marketing it through their other products.
Dropbox's advantage is their existing customer base.
In time I think Google's got the upper hand on this one.
I don't see how that's a hard and fast rule. File storage is Dropbox's only business line - if it fails, they're gone. If it helps their other concerns (Gmail, Google Apps) Google can prop up Drive even if its unprofitable.
Depends.
Google might decide to stop supporting it because they want to focus on something else and DropBox might decide to pivot because they can no longer make enough money compared to the costs they incur (especially as Google is slowly squeezing them out of the market with the kind of price slashing we are currently discussing).
Nobody can claim with certainty which of Google or DropBox is more likely to support their product the longest.
This announcement just made that significantly cheaper, and there's opportunity here for a "cloud RAID" offering to take the hassle out of mirroring one's data. Dropbox already has the API, so they could turn this to their advantage.
I take a picture with my phone? It's on dropbox. My wife takes a picture? It's on dropbox. I take a screenshot on my PC? It's on dropbox.
I even wrote a little silly bookmark tool to use the dropbox API.
Dropbox is amazing. It's more than just about the price.
You just answered your own question. Dropbox is convenient because you've already installed it everywhere. Google Drive is already on your Android phone and in your e-mail inbox.
I can't put my finger on it but Drive just seems clunky, especially with the GMail / Docs integration.
I'd just stop you there because you may have answered your own question.
If I was new to the market, though, none of that reasoning really applies.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dripmarks/oeibaijn...
There is a legitimate reason to be wary of relying on anything Google.
Just to be absolutely clear... you'll have 2 years to drag and drop a folder to another location.
Are you saying they may significantly cut down the cloud capabilities?
Google Wallet does not have subscriptions.
None of my customers missed Google Checkout. I got burned by losing subscriptions due to Google Checkout retirement.
I'm not going to touch Google Wallet.
Dropbox, on the contrary, only has a SINGLE service to rely on, and they could be made obsolete by pricing, features, integration or other stuff like that. It's not good to rely on a single service for your bottom line, and Dropbox is no longer a small startup just beginning on the market.
As a counterpoint to that, Dropbox might not exist in 5 years. Google most likely will.
Basically, there is no answer here that guarantees the future of your cloud storage. It's useful to access your files from multiple locations, but using it for long term file archival seems like asking for disappointment (as well as being a neat way of throwing money into the sky).