Is this partially an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of the Box IPO? If there's going to be a price war anyway, better to start it now and prevent a competitor from amassing a big war chest.
I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so could be way off base.
I don't see how Box could possibly compete on pricing with Google storage, considering the high volume of hardware purchases Google is doing and high volume discounts it's getting.
They only reduced the prices for compute engine, bigquery, appengine, and cloud storage which are developer oriented cloud services and therefore unrelated to box. If google beefed up google drive, then it could be an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of box.
I personally think google has more incentive to do the latter. Millions of people and thousands of companies already use gmail. It'd be pretty easy to convince people to take those files they already send/receive using gmail and push them to google drive. Convincing hardcore AWS users to move to google app engine might be a bit tougher.
I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so could be way off base.