Look at things from another perspective: this drop-down menu that gets extended with all these “pluggable capabilities” is the very same menu, conceptually, that you get when you right-click in the empty space of a folder in Windows Explorer or the macOS Finder.
As far as I can tell, Dropbox’s vision is of having the same sort of thin-client experience of having an app that represents “your files” and lets you do things do those files like an Explorer or Finder would—but with this app providing these integrations regardless of your platform (Windows/macOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Linux) or cloud provider.
This is already the play that Slack used: despite Google Hangouts being integrated better with the Google enterprise ecosystem, people still use Slack instead, and take advantage of its integrations with Google apps instead. Regardless of platform or ecosystem, Slack supports your use-case, such that it’s easier to get everyone in an organization to agree on Slack than to get them to agree on a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox thinks it can pull off the same play, for the “file explorer” use-case. Dropbox wants to add enough functionality that the “best-practice workflow” for an enterprise—the one that onboarding docs get written about, the one they train people in—will involve using Dropbox to move files around and open them in various apps, because that’s simpler than the docs they’d have to write to explain how to do the same thing in the different paradigms of each platform the enterprise supports.
It’s an enterprise B2B play, though, and sadly, there’s already a neutral third-party “Windows Explorer in the cloud” that has beat them to capturing this market: Box. They’re definitely trying to fight Box over market-share here, and I’m not sure they’ll manage it; Box focused much more on things enterprises really want from the start (like document security—IBM can put its customers’ data in Box without worrying, etc.)
As far as I can tell, Dropbox’s vision is of having the same sort of thin-client experience of having an app that represents “your files” and lets you do things do those files like an Explorer or Finder would—but with this app providing these integrations regardless of your platform (Windows/macOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Linux) or cloud provider.
This is already the play that Slack used: despite Google Hangouts being integrated better with the Google enterprise ecosystem, people still use Slack instead, and take advantage of its integrations with Google apps instead. Regardless of platform or ecosystem, Slack supports your use-case, such that it’s easier to get everyone in an organization to agree on Slack than to get them to agree on a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox thinks it can pull off the same play, for the “file explorer” use-case. Dropbox wants to add enough functionality that the “best-practice workflow” for an enterprise—the one that onboarding docs get written about, the one they train people in—will involve using Dropbox to move files around and open them in various apps, because that’s simpler than the docs they’d have to write to explain how to do the same thing in the different paradigms of each platform the enterprise supports.
It’s an enterprise B2B play, though, and sadly, there’s already a neutral third-party “Windows Explorer in the cloud” that has beat them to capturing this market: Box. They’re definitely trying to fight Box over market-share here, and I’m not sure they’ll manage it; Box focused much more on things enterprises really want from the start (like document security—IBM can put its customers’ data in Box without worrying, etc.)