Over the last two weeks I've been playing a bit with the three main cloud storage services and their respective Windows applications, that let you map a folder to remote storage. I've read countless blog posts about the license agreements and I really think that despite the different wording they are almost identical; I've read debates about the price comparison (but they are difficult to compare, because they do different things). What I'm not seen covered is the cabability of the Windows client applications and the quality of their integration with Windows Explorer. If you want to use them to keep a local copy of your main PC files on a safe location, and move others to a public folder to share them with the world, you don't want to use the browser and upload or download file. You want this to happen seamlessly. That's why Google released a Windows application for GDrive and Microsoft (after a few years) released one for SkyDrive. DropBox? They had one for quite some time...
Microsoft SkyDrive
Microsoft has had SkyDrive for quite some time and now gave us early users some extra free space... until the change the service name (I notice that changes Windows Live and Azure to something else). After a few years they released a client application in the same week Google released theirs. Don't tell me Microsoft doesn't need competition to put its act together! Anyway, after you install it and connect it to your Microsoft account (or Windows Live ID) you get to pick a folder that's kept in synch with cloud storage. Choose wisely, as you cannot change the folder later on but need to uninstall and re-install. Not good. After the process, you get an icon in the notification area:Google GDrive
Google's storage service has been rumored for years, and it was finally released recently. it is integrated with Google Docs (and Google Apps), which already provided file storage at least for those (like myself) with a paid company account. Now you get integration with the Windows file system. Again, when you install GDrive you point it to a folder and it show a nice icon in your notification area, with some more menu items:DropBox
DropBox is the service that first integrated remote or cloud document storage with Windows. I think they still use Amazon's S3 behind the scenes, which explains why they are considerably more expensive. I do have quite a lot of free storage from they referral program... if you want to contribute some more signup to DropBox from this link.From the installation, you can notice that DropBox has more flexibility. It's notification icon keep telling you of the files is it downloading or uploading, and using it for shared content among multiple computers is really very nice. The icon and its menu look like this:
But the real difference between DropBox and the other services becomes visible as you start moving to Windows Explorer itself. DropBox enabled files and folders have extra menu items that let you perform specific actions, like making a folder public, retrieving the URL of a public resource, getting past versions of the files, and perform many more actions without having to open the web browser. As Microsoft's solution (and well before it), the files and folders are marked with status icons. Here are the two instances of the folder and file menus, but their actual content depends on the sych and accessibility status:
Conclusion: DropBox clearly wins on Windows Integration
Online services must work nicely and easily give you power without having to resort to a browser, be geared towards synchronizing different computers and devices. For now on Windows DropBox is a clear winner (and I'm not saying this because of the affiliation, as I'm also a Microsoft and Google Partner). Too bad the price difference is significant. Cannot Google or Microsoft or Amazon go buy DropBox (make Joel happy) and deliver us the best of the two worlds? Or hire a good Windows programmer and make Windows Explorer integration a little more rich for their online storage services? Microsoft should have the knowledge to do this and I was expecting a bit more from them.
PS. Or maybe one of us could write a Delphi application for integrating with Explorer, and sell it to them. Microsoft already bought a Delphi application for a few millions (Skype), you never know. ;-)ICT4PE&D
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