Google Drive And The Cloud Wars
Editor's note: Aaron Levie is co-founder and CEO at Box. Follow him on Twitter @levie. — For the past six years, any startup touching the cloud storage space has lived in anticipation and fear of Google's entry into the market.
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece is a TechCrunch guest post from Box CEO Aaron Levie, written the week Google confirmed its entry into consumer cloud storage with Google Drive — the moment startups in the space have, by his own account, spent six years anticipating and fearing. It lands shortly after Google's October 2011 storage and App Engine push aimed squarely at Amazon Web Services, which signaled that storage was becoming infrastructure for the company rather than a standalone bet.
First-order effects
- Standalone storage vendors like Box and Dropbox now compete against a product Google can bundle free or cheap alongside Gmail, Docs, and Android, changing the terms on which they sell storage itself.
- Levie's own framing — that his company has lived in 'anticipation and fear' of this entry — makes the post a public positioning exercise: Box must argue it sells something other than raw gigabytes.
Second-order effects
- With a hyperscaler giving storage away inside an existing ecosystem, pricing pressure moves down-market fast, pushing venture-backed startups toward enterprise features, integrations, and support where bundling is weaker.
- Amazon and Microsoft face the same squeeze from the opposite side: Google's October 2011 move against AWS plus Drive means it is attacking both developer infrastructure and consumer file storage simultaneously.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, file storage stops being a business category and becomes a platform feature, forcing independent vendors to justify themselves on workflow and governance rather than capacity.
- Trust emerges as the competitive axis: the same news cycle carries reports of Google fighting federal authorities over Megaupload emails (unconfirmed court filings) and an Android flaw letting developers read personal photos, which hands privacy-sensitive buyers a reason to weigh who holds their files.
The trend: Cloud storage is being absorbed into platform bundles by hyperscale incumbents, pushing standalone sync-and-store startups upmarket toward enterprise workloads.