What is Box?
Box is a cloud storage app that allows you to save, access, edit, and collaborate with fellow coworkers or friends in any given document. What I love about Box’s introduction is how the company thinks about offering the best cloud storage.
Box refers to its cloud storage as “a hard drive in the cloud.” This is an appropriate way to think about cloud storage, seeing that cloud storage serves the same purpose hard drives once did: to store documents for later retrieval. I think this is an excellent way to describe cloud storage because it helps the average consumer understand what it is. I grew up in a time when hard drives were the main way businesses kept backup documents of all its work. This was also a time in which the PC was king. We didn’t live in the time of mobile, and people didn’t necessarily care about whether or not they could access documents on the go. For the average business professional back in, say, the 1990s, hard drives were all about storing documents so that, should something happen to a document or a file, one could retrieve it in the hard drive.
Keep in mind that, although Box markets itself toward Fortune 500 company business professionals, it is still a cloud storage application downloadable onto any device – whether the consumer is a business professional or not. I consider myself to be a business professional, but I am self-employed and do not work for a Fortune 500 company (and I still managed to create an account).
What Kinds of Services Does Box Offer?
Box offers the same kinds of opportunities as many other cloud storage applications do. One of the new movements in cloud storage applications that is quickly becoming popular is the ability to share a file as a link from your cloud storage account. The ability to share links to your files instead of having to send an entire PDF or Word document makes things easier to share on the web. Links, or URLs, are the way most web users share documents, is it not? On social media sites such as Facebook or Google Plus, articles are shared by way of a link or URL, correct? If we share articles online by way of URLs, why not share cloud documents in the same manner? I do not know who thought of this idea, but it is simply genius to be able to share documents in this manner.
Not only can you make changes to your documents and files, but you can know when, say, a coworker or colleague, makes changes to and edits the same file. Box keeps the changes and records them for you as status updates in real time, so that you need not play “the guessing game” when it comes to file changes.
Do you want to collaborate with coworkers and friends in your cloud storage application? I think Box’s collaboration component is huge for business professionals. After all, if a group of professionals are collaborating on a huge promotion or project, why resort to other email services and texting – when you can simply post responses within the Box app? Box gets it right when it comes to an all-in-one service. After all, it is easier and more convenient to collaborate with partners in the app, than to have to close out the Box app and resort to Gmail, for instance.
The “Box” concept (also picked up by cloud storage leader Dropbox) is one that we would be wise to never forget. After all, what’s in a box? Usually, when someone wants to store things that matter to him or her, the individual places these things in a box and categorizes them: there’s a box for old China, a box for old high school yearbooks, a box for old video games, a box for old construction tools, and so on. When a person prepares to donate clothing to a homeless shelter, he or she usually organizes their box or boxes according to clothes: socks go in one box, t-shirts in another, pairs of shoes in another, a box for jewelry (earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets, etc.). Individuals may even have a box devoted to old music CDs, and that box stores all of their physical disks (not some of them).
Box understands that the “box” (for which its name derives) should be categorized for storage and have all you need. Since the company offers its services in the cloud, the cloud service should be thought of as a “box” that contains all you need in the cloud – including email and a messenger application of some kind. After all, email is a common form of cloud storage whereby one account accesses all your emails sent, saved, and read.
Box Highlights a Growing Problem in the Mobile User Experience
The problem with a number of companies at the moment is that, although they offer excellent cloud storage services, they do not take advantage of the “box all-in-one” concept. I have said this about Google before. Google runs Android OS, created it, designed it, and has been in control of it ever since. Google offers a number of excellent services such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Plus, and others, but needs to create more of a “Google Box” experience for Android users at least.
I think the problem with Google regarding the multiple apps that provide its services has to do with the lack of a PC approach to mobile. It is true that, in some sense, the mobile experience is different from the PC experience – since applications do the same thing (even faster) than a typical PC would. At the same time, however, I should be able to go to one app and find all the services I need – in the same way that one can visit his or her Google + account on a PC/laptop and find all the services he or she needs.
The Android experience, however, is complex: with Google’s services being spread out in several apps: Gmail, Google Play, Google Drive, Google’s Chrome OS, YouTube, Google +, Google Wallet, Google Hangouts, Google Currents, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Keep, Play Books, Play Magazines, Play Movies and TV, Play Music, and Voice Search. All of these apps are on the Nexus 7 – totaling some 16 Google service apps in all! I understand the need to customize the experience for the Nexus 7 user, but how many new consumers to the tablet market will use or know what all of these services are for? Very few.
I have owned my 2012 Nexus 7 tablet for the last four months and I rarely use Google’s Voice Search – although I know what it’s for. I have never opened Google Keep to know what it is, and I don’t have any Play magazines or play movies and TV – so these apps will never arrive on my main desktop on the 2012 Nexus 7. And what about widgets? I love widgets, but there are seven full pages of widgets on my Nexus 7, many that I will never use. Would it not be easier to integrate these widgets into one application, pre-installed on the Nexus 7 from day one?
If Google integrated its many services and baked them into three apps (perhaps), it would be easier for consumers to use its services. Consumers may even be willing to try different features of say, three or four apps, than to attempt to try the services contained in 9 apps.
If Google placed many of its pages of apps in the cloud (and not on local memory storage), consumers would need not purchase so much local memory storage (16GB or 32GB) and would be able to keep the pages of apps and widgets they never use in the cloud – reducing the amount of storage many would have to purchase out of the box. If Google’s Drive cloud storage service was a part of Android’s OS, as opposed to an application downloadable from the Play Store, an 8GB memory storage amount would seem larger than it is currently.
Box App Update
Although Box is on Android, Windows, and iOS platforms, the company updated its Android app (only) this week. Since Android is keen on rows of widgets, Box has added a widget to its cloud storage service, meaning that Android users can now monitor their cloud storage and document edit updates from the lock screen (where widgets can now be placed). The widget can be resized, meaning that you can have a smaller, more compact Box widget if you like.
In addition to a resizable screen widget, Box also offers the addition of the Finnish language to its language capacity (which, with its inclusion, now stands at 23 languages), not to mention user account switching. The account switching is pivotal for business professionals whose companies force them to separate their personal from their business work.
One other prominent feature of Box’s update this week is the addition of real-time updates when documents are edited. This is important so that your documents can stay accurate at every minute. This is important for business presentations and special documents and presents your document from looking different from that of your colleagues and collaborators. After all, it can’t be a group effort if partners are working with different documents, right?
At the moment, Box has a promotion going for LG devices, offering LG customers 50GB of free Box storage for the life of the LG device (whether smartphone or tablet). iOS customers who join now can receive up to 10GB of free storage, and Windows users who join for the first time can likely receive up to 50GB as can LG customers. It seems that Android customers will receive only 5GB of free storage, seeing that they received a 50GB promotion last year (2012).