Google Apps Marketplace
Google rolled out their Apps Marketplace yesterday at their Campfire One developer conference, unveiling an unexpectedly powerful way to leverage the Apps platform for other applications.
The Marketplace is hitting the beach with applications from fifty developers including Intuit, Atlassian, and Box, and the word so far is that despite the 20% cut of revenues Google aims to collect from partners, the system they have introduced is vendor-friendly. With an available audience of 25 million users, that's sure to attract additional development quickly. Considering the relatively weak capabilities of the Apps themselves, there is a massive opportunity for more business-oriented developers than Google to fill in gaps that are of concern to business users.
Perhaps inevitably, the Apps Marketplace is being seen as another shot at Microsoft. The offering seems to be structured more for the SMB than the enterprise market, but other than e-mail, that's always where Apps have had the greatest appeal anyway. This move is more likely to take a chunk out of Force.com than Microsoft, although the network effects of additional applications (and more importantly, the ability to integrate custom applications) may serve to make Apps a more attractive selection for day to day business overall.