Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.
There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.
Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously
User Interface. Dropbox presented a beautifully clean metaphor for how your files get synced. It doesn't matter if you understand what "the cloud" is. My grandmother understands: "put things in folder, folder available elsewhere".
On the other hand we've got Google Drive. Is GMail using Google drive? Is Google Photos using Google Drive? Why don't folders other people have shared to me not appear in my folder? Why isn't 'Shared with Me' the same as "Mine". Is Google Drive the same thing as Google Docs?
Not to mention - Dropbox really pushed the "Desktop App", while Google Drive pushed the "Web First" approach. Add on referral bonuses, Dropbox had some good solid adoption - well, at least among free users.
I use both extensively - Dropbox Pro for everything personal, and Google Drive for everything at work, and I still get confused about the where I saved/shared files to in Google Drive.
What do you mean?
Drive sync works fine like Dropbox, at least on Windows and Mac.
That source is pretty old and cites an even older source (it looks like it may be from Google I/O 2012). Searching for "Google Apps has 50 million users" actually gives articles from last year saying they have 50 million education users alone, so I'd say the number is a pretty extreme lowshot now.
But more importantly, why would you compare Google Apps and iCloud? The closer thing would be Android backup and iCloud, maybe?
Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records?
Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.
The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.
My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.
20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity.
15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo.
3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.
On the other hand, there were a few Chinese people there, and most of them seemed to have a non-halted life.
"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.