With the recent launch of the Blackberry App World program in line with Apple’s App Store and Microsoft expected to launch it’s own app store in the not too distant future companies are expecting developers to have their own skin in the game. The Blackberry App World program requires a registration fee of 200.00 USD which is no chump change. In return, freelance developers are able to market their applications to the global customer base that they typically would have difficulties reaching without a huge marketing budget. In the ideal scenario, as more applications become available and more users start using it, more developers start participating, creating what I heard as the “flywheel effect” from Wener Vogels, CTO at amazon.com. The faster this flywheel turns, the sooner it will result in a significant drop of prices for everyone involved.
In my previous blog I alluded to the different taxonomies of cloud computing and how as a developer Platform as a Service might be more interesting. There are more 1-off applications in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud rather than a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. However, applications deployed in a PaaS cloud are more focussed on solving a (or a set) of business problem(s) for a typically large community of users. Drawing a comparison to the app stores, the goal of Platform as a Service is to offer a superior platform (technology matters, but, is not the main focus) that helps leverage the ecosystem and the community.
How important is it for you application to leverage an existing platform and an existing user base? Is it important enough that it might become the sole criterion to choosing a particular cloud vendor?
Raghavan Srinivas' Blog 