tecosystems

Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise?

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It’s what I’ve come to call the WordPress Lesson. One of them, anyway. In an interview that I can sadly no longer find – such is the fate of content I forget to del.icio.us – WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg admitted that one of the mistakes the project had made was not intially providing an aggregation point for the volume of plugins, themes and other add-ons that distinguish the platform. Prior to the introduction of Extend, a person might have to crawl Google for a relevant plugin; now it’s a simple process.

What’s amazing is not that WordPress failed to do so, but that so many projects and products have learned nothing from this. True, I’m an outspoken proponent of network-enabled application marketplaces, but I still find it mind boggling that the notion is as rare as it is.

Consider that even with software as simple as a blogging platform, it’s rare that users install it and use it indefinitely with no further modifications, theme or otherwise. Customization seems to be, as SaaS advocates lament daily, a basic human need: I want something different than the guy next to me. Then factor in the overall level of expertise amongst user communities at large and that spells opportunity, n’est-ce pas?

Or do you find the humans-need-to-customize + most-can’t-do-it-on-their-own equation somehow flawed?

What is merely a lesson learned in a blogging platform, then, is something of a crime in the application platform world. If the market significance of an application platform is at least partially determined by the volume of third party apps designed for it, wouldn’t it behoove you to encourage their development by making the discovery and installation as simple and easy as possible?

Apple seems to have figured this out in its iTunes store, which is succeeding wildly in spite of the fact that it’s governed by policies that are fundamentally broken at every level. Much as I don’t approve of their baffling approval process, I do find it beneficial to find all (or, given the market for Jailbroken apps, “most of”) the applications for the platform available for me in one, single place. And while it’s always going to be more difficult to install and configure, say, the Apache web server than a Tetris clone for the iPhone, the differences to me only point to more opportunity: I would love for Ubuntu, our server platform at RedMonk, to connect me back to qualified, rated community resources capable of working on the various packages available in the repository.

To the extent that I would pay them for it.

Why is it, then, that application platforms so strongly divorce their product from the marketplaces that service them? No enterprise customer will put up with the degree of control currently enjoyed by Apple, of course, but that doesn’t mean that they might not appreciate the convenience of such a thing from time to time.

Sooner or later, application platform vendors are going to learn the WordPress lesson, but whether they learn it from there or from Apple is open to question. What isn’t open to question, I think, is the fact that application platform providers are going to try to create their own App Stores.

Just ask Cisco.

9 comments

  1. […] tecosystems » Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise?It’s what I’ve come to call the WordPress Lesson. One of them, anyway. In an interview that I can sadly no longer find – such is the fate of content I forget to del.icio.us – WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg admitted that one of the mistakes the project had made was not intially providing an aggregation point for the volume of plugins, themes and other add-ons that distinguish the platform. Prior to the introduction of Extend, a person might have to crawl Google for a relevant plugin; now it’s a simple process. […]

  2. well spoken… wish more developers would listen… ease of plugins and themes IS THE DEFACTO success factor for any project… just look at joomla

  3. […] tecosystems – Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise? […]

  4. we should talk. I have many questions.

  5. Stephen,

    Lots of enterprise vendors have partner catalogs. What is it about sites like Extend that you find so attractive? I would imagine the ability to directly buy and download from the site is important. Is there anything else?

  6. I contributed to WP when it was first out and had several conversations with Matt. Of course, he had several conversations with a LOT of folks. Plugins were a political subject matter, however, the problem was Matt and Ryan Boren couldn’t focus their time on plugins because they had enough to deal with keeping WP and PingOMatic going along with the quiet development of wordpress.com. In the case of WP I think it would’ve been a cart-before-the-horse issue. In fact, they are still in the same rut. Sure, Extend is a directory now but before there was a wiki anyone could easily refer to. WordPress makes money on wordpress.com not remote installations.

    Who gets it?

    Google. Open Google Spreadsheets and click insert widget — if you’d like you can point it at your own widget. I’m sure Microsoft will support this as well.

    Game Developers. World of Warcraft wouldn’t be what it is if the application didn’t have an internal Lua-driven API for creating addons that do everything. Counter-strike anyone?

    Google Android. Same as Blizzard, but better – you can replace functionality for every aspect of the UI and there are no cheaters so Google really doesn’t need much control over the APIs.

    Who will be the next app developer who has the guts to open an API up for client-side AND server-side plugins?

    Meanwhile WordPress still doesn’t allow plugins for wordpress.com.

  7. […] tecosystems – Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise? […]

  8. […] I admit to still being absolutely mystified by the absence of marketplaces that incorporate, you know, actual developers. Clearly I’m […]

  9. […] Just come across this interesting post from Stephen O’Grady which is well worth a read: Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise? Share this […]

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