SVG Version of Image:Pac_Man.png (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dropbox, I have nothing against you. In fact, the syncing I’m come to know and love that you invented has made my life much easier many times over. When I see people email themselves files I laugh at them, because I have my trusty Dropbox. Though I want to make clear that I am a free user sucking the life out of Dropbox’s profits, so me leaving probably won’t matter much to them, but the thousands of paying Dropbox customers that will switch to GDrive will surely be painful. Maybe Dropbox will fix their pricing problem. I shell out $7.99 a month for Netflix, which I use a lot, but the idea of paying $10 a month for 50 gb of storage seems a bit ridiculous in my eyes. Nobody could have used say, 20GB for $4.99? I know I would have.
But the real reason, the elephant in the room, is that Google is joining in the Cloud fray with a product that is exactly like yours, except the storage is a quarter of the price, the storage options are more extensive, and it fits nicely into everything else you use with Google. It’s called Google Drive. Drive has a pricing option of $2.49 a month for 25 gigs. Google, I’m down with that. And now Gmail gets 10 GB of space instead of 7, so I can keep more of my parents’ forwarded Windows Media Player video attachments without worrying about deleting them. Ahh.
Last week, I wrote about Insync, a startup that brought Dropbox-functionality to your Mac or PC. I’m sure as of this announcement they’ll be closing their doors. Which is unfortunate, but I’m sure they’ll come up with another great product of their own.
And to all the people freaking out about privacy and ownership of documents, I wouldn’t worry. Those terms are in place just so people don’t sue them, not so they can steal your secretive business documents and post your photos on Google +. Doing that would be a PR disaster.
And as much as I want to try Skydrive because it is cheaper and offers more free storage (7 GB) than Google Drive, I can’t. No really, I downloaded Skydrive for Mac and plugged in my Live account and password to get started and got an error. I thought my password might have been wrong so I went to the website to check, I had a password reset sent and when I tried to activate it I got another error. Oh, Microsoft. There’s a reason I don’t use any of your products anymore.
For Dropbox, I feel for you. But business is business Maybe Dropbox should have gone with those acquisition offers after all.
