I see that Dropbox is dropping their apps. 

Sorry to see this happen. Not joking or being sarcastic. I think Dropbox is a great product. A real groundbreaker and enabler. I had wanted something like it ever since I started using the web. They delivered, at scale. It's reliable and so useful you almost forget about it. 

They also had the vision of browser-based JavaScript apps. A vision that's now taking the leap back to the desktop with the excellent Electron product, that combines Chrome and Node.js into a desktop environment. I'm tripping out on the power. Huge. 

Back to Dropbox.

Their apps didn't work in the market, not sure why, maybe because they weren't designed to prime the pump for developers like MacWrite and MacPaint were in the early days of the Mac. Maybe Dropbox missed the target by a few degrees, maybe they had the right idea but the wrong implementation?

It might be worth a rethink. Instead of being an application -- perhaps Dropbox is an operating system? That's the way I think of it. The earliest OSes were all about managing storage, then they started doing process management, and eventually took on the user interface. But first there was storage. And of course that's exactly what Dropbox does so well. 

If they decided to really seriously invest in an app ecosystem, they could do what any platform vendor could but never does -- invest in developers, and commit to staying out of their way. I felt Microsoft should have done this at the dawn of the web, and Google should have later, when social networks were taking off. It's too much to expect that your up-and-running tech company could act like the seat-of-the-pants art-driven app developers you need to boot up an ecosystem. I would not have made the bet they did, absorbing products, rather I would have spread investment around and let a thousand flowers bloom. 

Focus on this. With the right set of services, mostly just interfaces for services Dropbox already provides, full apps could be developed, great apps, that don't have a server component. It's a huge opportunity. No one, not Twitter, not Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Apple, Amazon, no one has done this work yet. Amazes me that such huge tasty sweet ripe fruit is hanging out there for the picking. 

There are still lots of ways to slice this. I hope Dropbox hasn't given up on the idea of being a platform. It would be a shame, a huge missed opportunity, imho.