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Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

It's in areas like this that Google sometimes oversteps the mark and veers dangerously close to "being evil" territory... in MY opinion.

As I see it: Dropbox innovated, and they innovated well. It's inevitable that competition would arise, but competition on the scale Google can offer could well mean total annihilation for Dropbox, if annihilation is what Google pursues.

Google doesn't "need" to enter this market. And yes, I know that there's no rule that says you have to be nice... but it feels crappy to me. Dropbox has earnt it's success, and Google could easily let them grow and secure their future before releasing G-Drive. Google is in a position to be something of a patriarch in the tech world as opposed to eating it's young.

If I was working on a Dropbox competitor yesterday, today I'd be finding something else to do. That's bad for innovation.

if G-Drive actually exists that is.

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Nope. Bad logic.

I love Dropbox, but welcome to capitalism. Dropbox could exit to Google in an instant. They could have for years. The only reason they haven't is because they want to maximize the risk adjusted returns for their shareholders.

Since Google can't aquire Dropbox at a reasonable price, yet finds it necessary to have this type of service built into their offering, they are more than ok to compete.

Google isn't entering this market though; they're already in it. This is merely rebranding a feature of Docs as its own product. Which makes sense, because files are not a subset of documents, documents are a subset of files. This probably has more to do with Larry Page's emphasis on product focus.

And I don't think this kills Dropbox at all. This is classic capitalism. Dropbox's competitive advantage is that they can completely focus on cloud storage, whereas the Google team is likely working on a half dozen or more other projects simultaneously. Dropbox is already tied into many apps, and has excellent features such as the ability to run your website from it. This does mean that Dropbox has to improve their efficiency to drop prices; they don't have to match GDrive but they have to come close.

Any company - big or small - is going to enter markets where they think they can make an impact. I don't think it's about being nice to smaller companies (and BTW, Dropbox isn't that small any more). It's about what's the best fit for users, and having the market decide the winner. If Google make a product that can't compete with Dropbox's ease of use, they'll flounder, as have many Google products in the past (Buzz, Notebook, Dodgeball, Lively, Answers and so on). Sure - big companies have advantages of scale and cross-promotion, but small companies have advantages of speed and lack of bureaucracy.

Competition is good for users, and arguably good for companies too. Nice just doesn't come into it.

It wasn't good for users when Microsoft put Netscape out of business, and It wont be good for users if Google puts Dropbox out of business.

This argument seems silly. Early innovation does not mean an end to competition, or an eternal lock on a product type.

Google's search engine would have never come into existence if their founders followed this line of thinking.

Read carefully. I'm not saying Dropbox should have a monopoly, but that the competition should be more evenly matched.

Unfortunately, when it comes to business, there is no feather-weight category. That said, Google it self overcame already entrenched competition in search through a better product and defended well against competitor with deep pockets (Microsoft).

That's "evil" only because they will compete with a smaller company that you personally happen to like.

yup, and I was very careful to point out that it was "my" view.

I wonder if Google offered to buy Dropbox at any point. Regardless, it's still possible that they would purchase Dropbox for their existing user base, mindshare and tech, as they did with Youtube although they already had a competing Google Video service.

oh yeah Dropbox innovated. Allowing anyone to login to any account without a password? Novel!

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