On the other hand, Dropbox's integration into the native OS is one of their best selling points. If I remember correctly, they actually had to do something along the lines of code injection into Mac OSX's Finder in order to get the dropbox-centric icons and options to appear[1].
Box.net only offers desktop sync to larger clients, and other competitors have yet to beat the frictionless Dropbox experience on native computers.
The way Google could win would be auto-import from Dropbox, tight OS integration, and online editing in Docs.
box.net offers a webdav interface, even for their free accounts. That's an open standardized interface for box.net vs. a proprietary client for Dropbox.
True, but WebDAV clients are nowhere near the perfect user experience that the proprietary Dropbox client provides (at least on OS X and Linux, I don’t know about Windows).
Box.net only offers desktop sync to larger clients, and other competitors have yet to beat the frictionless Dropbox experience on native computers.
The way Google could win would be auto-import from Dropbox, tight OS integration, and online editing in Docs.
1: Here at 15:30 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how...