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Comment by esutton | Hacker News Reader

i remember hearing the same argument when google made google videos to compete with youtube, and we all know how that ended. That said, there were social and community aspects there that don't apply here, and google's cheaper storage prices and larger feature set may give it a leg up.

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It's dangerous for Dropbox because GDrive will be automatically integrated into all Google services. I can access it anywhere from any Google service or device. No need to think about uploading, downloading, copying, pasting--it's just there. I don't use GDocs because it's the best.

I use it because all my friends use Gmail and sharing docs with them is super easy. I see GDrive having the same benefits. Sharing on Dropbox still isn't as easy as it should be. I've been trying to convince my girlfriend to sign up for a Dropbox accounts since we started dating, but no luck. With Gdrive, she will never need to.

That said, success is still not guaranteed. MS has had SkyDrive for years and I have no idea what the market penetration numbers are, but I'm sure they aren't good. Hotmail is no Gmail. I had no problems convincing a bunch of people to switch to Gmail, but only got one person to sign up for Dropbox.

Can it be scripted though? I want to set up a cron task to gzip a directory and send it to GDrive every night.

if its a desktop program like dropbox with a synced folder, you can write a script to place the gzip in the synced folder, and then it will sync automatically

That could work, hopefully it's a 1 way sync though. I don't want all of the contents of my cloud storage to be pulled down to my server.

you can use selective sync

Google Video launched a month before YouTube fyi.

you are right, my bad i missed that. Even so, my original comment is still relevant when you look at how google eventually realized their own product wouldn't catch up to a startup's, and bought them out.

It ended with Google buying YouTube.

Do you think they're going to buy DropBox too?

I highly doubt it. What i meant was that google videos failed. Google bought youtube for its community, not for its backend. This is not relevant with regard to dropbox, as file sync is a technical problem and google is fully capable of providing a technical solution.

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