Aren't they rushing to disable public folders just so they can write off their biggest money drain from the books just for the IPO?

this is «any IPOed startup from last decade» all over again.

Shame, too, as it was the Dropbox feature I used the most. I hate having to link people to the clunky, slow-to-load viewer interface that Dropbox presents when you make a share link. I also don't want comments! (which always takes up an entire sidebar and has to be manually closed)

| In the meantime Dropbox's core offering of syncing and sharing files seamlessly as well as providing more security minded options for businesses is something that no one else has quite gotten right.

There is absolutely no mention whatsoever neither in the article, nor in your analysis above about Owncloud.

Owncloud (or any OSS fork thereof) is an existential threat to Dropbox's core offering: while the consumer side is not yet price-competative, it can already be one-click deployed by many VPS providers. And the business case for hosting mission-critical data onsite, or at least own leased equipment & encryption is strong, and enjoys economies of scale.

I went on a little adventure the other week of setting up my own NAS server, and checked out Owncloud and competitors. Even ignoring issues like feature parity and third-party app integration, I think the setup costs of something like this are still way too high for consumers. While VPS providers may make this process easier (even deploying complete Dropbox clones with no tech knowledge required), they'd still be doing it at a significant disadvantage to Dropbox's scale and expertise. It was clear to me very quickly just how much work has gone into giving Dropbox the level of polish it has. Note that this doesn't even address other competitive moats such as brand recognition and distribution partnerships.

Not saying that Dropbox doesn't face business risks -- but I think the open-source alternatives will not be the biggest risk ulttimately in the mainstream market.

I do think they will face margin pressures as long as Google/MSFT/Apple/Amazon believe this to be too important of a market to cede to Dropbox.

though things like Owncloud help make it easier for self hosting, many enterprises will still prefer to opt for something like Dropbox because Operations are hard!

Why does anyone use hosted travis CI despite being able to run it ourselves? Why do people use google apps instead of hosting their own mail servers? Because instead of having your employees do something they're not necessarily good at, you will pay experts to do something they are (supposedly) good at for a fraction of the price.

Yes because Owncloud will never get the kind of adoption that Dropbox has specifically because it isn't consumer oriented.

It's just like Linux. It can own the backend / developer world, but Linux is still no where on the desktop for the average consumer.

Honestly whoever can make the easiest way to share photos between iPhones will win. That and just store all of my photos forever.

You know Apple already offers that, right? I don't want to sound like an Apple shill so I will avoid naming the feature; apple is big enough that if they can't get the word out it's not my problem!

Nope.. I can't directly iMessage a large video or photo set. Also photo stream requires syncing photos on multiple devices.. what we really need is upload to the cloud and forget (or at least browse on demand) and not require local storage... This is really only a problem for the lower end iPhones.. but it sucks.

And iMessage should just do this transparently.

try giving google photos a try. I have been using google photos for a long time now (it used to be called picasa).

PS: I am a google employee, but my opinion on google photos literally has no bias. I don't use Iphone, I own android, so YMMV.

I have to second this. It's amazing how right Google has gotten the photo experience, incrementally, over the past few years. Meanwhile, photo on iOS have essentially stood still during that time.

OneDrive does this and can sync your camera roll. I use it to sync iPhone photos to my desktop and back.

You do need to open the app to sync.

The other nice feature would be a public dropbox that you could give people special links or codes to upload to.

That's sort of exists with the file requests feature.

> In the meantime Dropbox's core offering of syncing and sharing files seamlessly as well as providing more security minded options for businesses is something that no one else has quite gotten right.

I'd argue that Dropbox haven't quite gotten it right either: to my knowledge, they still don't support client-side encryption, which is IMHO non-negotiable in any cloud storage product.

I really respect Dropbox's ease-of-use, but I think at this stage in history it's outright irresponsible to offer a cloud service in which one can see one's customers' data.

> As is being cash flow positive which would indicate that if they are burning cash it isn't at the rate of 2x revenue that Box has been a victim of.

I'm probably inferring something you didn't mean here. By "if they are burning cash" did you mean "yes they're wasting money, but still less than they're making so that's great"

Or is it possible to be "cash flow positive" while spending >1x revenue?

You are correct and inferring the right thing, that even if they are burning cash it isn't substantial because you can't be cash flow positive and burn >1x revenue.

If you can open items from Dropbox and edit them directly, there might be hope for the product. Saving even one click between Dropbox and my current collaborative tool (Google Docs, Slack, etc) can be meaningful.

I agree that it will be very, very difficult for Dropbox to become a collaborative platform.

They wanted to become a platform for photos earlier (with Carousel), but that failed.