DropBox

2014. Dropbox integrates with Microsoft Office



Microsoft and Dropbox announced a partnership that will see Dropbox better support Microsoft’s Office suite. The deal has four main parts: Quickly editing Office docs from the Dropbox mobile app; accessing Dropbox docs from Office apps; sharing Dropbox links of Office apps; and the creation of first-party Dropbox apps for Microsoft’s mobile offerings. No you can add your Dropbox account to Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint mobile apps, navigate folders and files on Dropbox to view and edit in the native Office apps. In return, Dropbox will encourage its users to turn to Microsoft Office applications to edit and create their documents in the first place. Microsoft has another alliance with Box to ease co-existence of Office 365 and Box cloud storage and file sync software.


2012. Google launched Google Drive



After (just) six years after the first rumors appeared Google has launched the legendary file storage service Google Drive. And the first question is: why they created Google Drive as a separate service, when Google Docs is de-facto Google's online storage that can store any files? There is a couple of reasons. First, such file storage and sharing services (Dropbox and clones) is a very hot topic either in consumer or enterprise space. And the attention that Google can attract with the new app in this space is not a bad thing for the search giant. Second, Google Drive will serve as a file system not only for Google Docs, but also for other Google's services that operate files (GMail, Google +, Google Sites, Picasa ...). ***