Winzip has been a household name in file compression for two decades. WinZip 17 takes file compression and management to the cloud with Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Dropbox integration—and now a new update is available that adds Box to the mix.

WinZip was a pioneer of the freemium software business model—basically providing the software for free, and relying on the moral compass of customers to pay for the product if it proved to be useful to them. I used to download a wide variety of shareware applications following a similar strategy, but WinZip was the first one I ever felt compelled to actually pay for.

Over the years, hard drive and flash drives have grown exponentially in size, and the cost of storage has gone down, so the need for a file compression utility has declined. However, the rise of photos and videos—which can be massive files—and the desire to upload information to social networks or cloud storage services has brought it back in vogue. It’s much easier and faster to upload a 100Mb file instead of a 1GB file.

WinZip has evolved to be a much more comprehensive file management tool than it once was. It still provides file compression, but now it also includes the ability to convert documents to PDF, add custom watermarks to PDF files, and post files directly to popular social networks.

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