Box.com CEO Aaron Levie has just written the most (unintentionally) funny thing I’ve read recently. He’s responding to Microsoft’s announcement that it is raising the storage quota on OneDrive for Business from 25GB to 1TB per user.

Here’s Levie:

“By keeping Office 365 users on the closed OneDrive ‘island,’ Microsoft is stranding hundreds of millions of users and customers that have chosen Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. And by releasing Office on the iPad without the ability to view or edit documents from any cloud service other than their own, they’re making it harder — not easier – for users to get the most out of their software.”

Yes, Aaron, and your point is? It isn’t fair to pick on a young CEO because he is, well, 28-years-old, but a 48-year-old wouldn’t have such delusions of a Microsoft that plays will with others (when not clearly in its own best interest).

And to Levie’s point, such as it is, how much more difficult is Microsoft making things for us users? Sure, I am an Office 365 user and don’t like the preferential pointing to OneDrive as the repository for the documents I create. Yes, I can save to Dropbox but it’s not the easy by default.

The only reason I care about this is because I already have my whole small business and life in a 9GB free Dropbox. When I got the free 25GB OneDrive with Office 365, I copied all my Dropbox files over to OneDrive but haven’t started routinely saving files there.

Now that Microsoft is increasing my OneDrive to a terabyte, Levie needs to remind me why exactly I need a Dropbox or Box? Microsoft is adding essentially unlimited storage that I am not paying extra for so the only hassle is dragging-and-dropping some files over to OneDrive? Yes, Aaron, that’s the kind of abuse Microsoft customers must endure these days.

Even better, Microsoft is making its 1TB OneDrive accounts available for as little as $2.50-a-month. That’s half off the normal $5 monthly tab. What does Dropbox charge for only 500GB of storage? $499-per-year. Wow, that’s an easy decision, thanks Satya!

The week Microsoft closed the door on its rivals

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In writing this snark, I mean no disrespect to Mr. Levie, who is doubtlessly a talented executive just to survive eight long years, raise over $300 million and still not have an IPO launched. I’d say Box’s IPO prospects ain’t what they used to be, but Levie will be around for many years, I hope, and I’d expect him to succeed.

I saw a Box executive quoted about the Microsoft announcement, putting on the brave face, saying his company expects to provide cloud storage as a backend to applications more than storage for individual users. Like Microsoft hasn’t thought of that?

For several years, I’ve been saying that Dropbox dies when Microsoft and perhaps Google and maybe even Amazon, get serious about keeping customers within each of their own ecosystems.

It’s easy to imagine how Microsoft can leverage OneDrive, as it is already starting to do, adding features that make life easier for its customers. It is also using its apps to make it more difficult for customers to save to Dropbox and Box.

There are some optimists who see this as temporary shortsightedness on Microsoft’s part. I agree, as soon as everyone moves their files to (cheap) OneDrive storage, Microsoft will make it easier to get to its (more expensive, less functional) competitors.

Unless something radically changes — Dropbox offers 2TB for Microsoft’s price? — this will be remembered as the week when Microsoft closed the door on Box and Dropbox.

photo credit: jdlasica via photopin cc