While I should be studying for finals right now, I just had to write a quick post about the Google Apps Marketplace. As you might be able to tell from my last post, I’m getting more interested in the ecosystems behind application marketplaces (mobile or otherwise). I previously interned at salesforce.com working on their force.com platform, so I think Google’s foray into the B2B application market is particularly interesting.
What I like a lot is that Google has favorable terms for developers (they take only 20% revenue) and that it plays nice with apps that aren’t built on the Google App Engine. This means that far more companies will be able to get their products into the marketplace and reach Google’s 25 million Google Apps users. In turn, Google should benefit from having more apps in their ecosystem. Salesforce, by contrast, is not nearly as open as it requires applications to be built on the force.com platform. Additionally, in the earlier days of the force.com platform, applications could only be deployed within the salesforce ecosystem. It took a while until salesforce started allowing applications built with force.com to be deployed elsewhere.
Techcrunch hints that Google may release a more consumer facing marketplace in the future…could be pretty interesting. I plan to keep following the Google Apps Marketplace to see how it does.
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