I think the original sentence was written more in of "Your loss is my gain" competitive advantage vein. The real trick is, as you say, to critically assess the output, and many people are incapable of that.
In talking about a switch to USB-C, one point seems to be missing - Lightning gives Apple absolute control over which devices can connect. If you don't pay up your MFI fees, and get your device blessed, then there's a chance it can be blocked in a later firmware update, at Apple's discretion. This extends all the way down to charging cables, (tho I'm not sure how well it's enforced / easily sidestepped for charging cables).
Maintaining that level of control, and maintaining the licencing revenue stream, over USB-C, might prove difficult?
Either that, or they change the connector, and leave all the handshake protocol / custom chipset at both ends in place, in which case we will end up with devices that are USB-C in connector only.
"Dropbox also went public. It had a first-day pop of 36 percent; however, with only 200,000 paying customers compared to its 500 million users, I would be hesitant to rush in to buy, even as it comes off that year-to-date high considerably."
If your only value metric is about personal storage, then you might see Dropbox as 'doomed' by its more-space-for-less-cost competitors.
I've worked with Dropbox and OneDrive and despite many people having access to a nominal TB of OneDrive storage via Office365 subscriptions, the creaky, Sharepoint underpinnings of the latter still make it a poor alternative to Dropbox for simple collaboration and sync. You can't just drop a bunch of files into the relevant folder on your HD and have them shared and synced; things like file name limitations will crop up, stalling the process indefinitely, and users don't see why it's their responsibility to work around those sort of things.
As far as collaboration is concerned, the ubiquity of Dropbox across platforms will keep it in front for some time to come.
I've written batch scripts with WP-CLI and mysql to spin up new sites, from scratch, including database creations, install latest core, a suite of base plugins, install themes and create child themes, and configure some options. Works a treat.
You've added another dependency into the mix here.
I've been comfortable storing my database in Dropbox, with a decent length master password (15char+) on the assumption that it uses a high quality hash that would make bruteforcing the encryption impractical, without having to add another layer of encryption above it. Curious if others feel this is a reasonable assumption?
I've had this experience with 2.x and as I recall, on machine B where the file was already open with unsaved changes, I was prompted to merge changes after Dropbox updated the file on disk. Without recalling the details, I was pretty impressed.
This talk of contracts sounds to me just like Android's intents, which have been in there forever - one example being a app having a share button that then pops up a list of all apps that offer an endpoint for a particular data type (ie share this photo by email / sms / dropbox / google plus / facebook / any other app you may have installed) - the hosting app has no idea about the endpoints, it just casts around and offers them to the user.
It's in scenarios like this where the back button makes perfect sense, where you change context midstream, and then wish to return to the original one. I recall on an iPhone in a similar scenario (emailing a photo) that there was no obvious way back to the place the photo came from - once you switched the mail app, it felt like a UX dead-end. Change your mind about sending the mail and you're stuck. Back works intuitively by comparison. It can even work in chains- snap a photo, share via an app that does image resizing, share the result again via email; back -> back -> and you're back in the camera app.