Google Opens Apps Marketplace 54
snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."
More Google Control (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More Google Control (Score:4, Insightful)
While I see the benefits of this, I can't help but see that all these things can be easily manipulated into Google "owning" the services using this
Sure. But this is still better than Apple's ecosystem.
remember the motto (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too much lock-in. (Score:4, Insightful)
Trusting Google (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have too much trouble trusting Google. They haven't done anything yet that would make me lose that trust. They have a lot riding on maintaining that trust with their users. I have more of a problem trusting the smaller companies (app developers) with my data. They don't depend on my trust as much.
Re:I hope this cloud bullshit ends soon. (Score:3, Insightful)
Eventually, even the stupidest of managers will have to realize that the marketing idiots pushing for cloud computing and "app stores" are full of shit, and fire their sorry asses.
The PHBs are reading trade magazines, and as long as the propaganda of "cloud *" is going strong they won't move a finger. That would also show them for fools, if after years of push for cloud they suddenly reverse the course.
While in long term it may be better for the business to have locally deployed and executed tools, cloud stuff appeals with its instant gratification - pay a small fee, click on a URL and you are done, no need to hire a sysadmin, no need to do anything! As long as you are OK with trusting the cloud, you are doing great; not everyone needs complex, locally executed software. And if the cloud fails now and then, you deal with it as you deal with any failure. Your own servers are far more likely to fail then Google's.
it makes me yearn for the days when we wrote Java apps deployed to our own Solaris servers, and didn't have to deal with all of the stupidity involved with developing and deploying even a simple cloud app.
Hopefully someone will post a point by point comparison, to see which method requires less stupidity :-) My own software is delivered through JTAG, so I'm out of loop on this battle.
Re:I hope this cloud bullshit ends soon. (Score:4, Insightful)
You guys don't get it. Apps developed for the cloud have to be infinitely scalable...if they don't scale well, the cloud provider is happy to just keep adding machines and charging you for your crappy workmanship. Google's App Engine (GAE) goes one step beyond by providing a container into which you can deploy your app, and the restrictions placed upon your app is to guarantee that it's well-behaved in terms of scalability.
For all you PHB's that read this site: this is for your benefit, not theirs, to keep your technical people from doing all the stupid things they're free to do on Amazon EC2 that costs you lots of money. And it's also why companies like RightScale can provide OTT services for EC2 and charge you...to manage a lot of the technical drudgery that goes along with doing what GAE gives you for free, provided you understand why you have to comply with the requirements of their container. (Once you understand that, you realize that even if you're developing for EC2 you should follow all the same restrictions in your development anyway, or you'll end up with runaway scaling problem.)
Re:Also more predictable expenses (Score:5, Insightful)
In a large company or organization, you can afford to hire the right people and build the right infrastructure to get handy stuff like single sign on(except for that one crap legacy app that everybody hates; but so it goes), user configurations that follow users between machines, backups that actually work, a network infrastructure that isn't a complete clusterfuck, standardized hardware and system images, and the like. Plus, over a large enough userbase, the somewhat bursty and unpredictable day-to-day IT costs can be averaged into something resembling a "TCO per capita" number that isn't a complete lie, which keeps the bean counters happy.
The smaller you get, though, the less likely that these things are true(particularly in businesses run by non techies. Your one man linux kernel development consultancy is probably Just Fine Thanks. Bob's Indy Auto Body is probably an IT disaster waiting to happen on a small scale). For a smaller outfit, having the technical expertise and infrastructure to provide the features that enterprises take for granted is hard. Having a decent admin permanently on staff is expensive overkill; but having to depend on consultants and geek squad visits is very pricey per-incident, can mean seriously uneven quality of service, and is hard to predict and budget for.
If Google can use the third party offerings to fill out the missing aspects of its Docs and Gmail offerings(payroll, accounting, any number of domain-specific software oddities), they could have a very compelling offering for a smaller business without much in-house technical expertise: Works on basically any modern computer with a browser and an internet connection, single sign on, some degree of integration between email, documents, and calendar, and a familiar interface, backups happen silently and automatically for you, all for some predictable subscription fee. Geeks with the chops to DIY, or larger outfits who can afford proper IT staff have had all this for some time, and will be harder to sway(geeks are likely to be cheap and/or afraid of Google's sinister intentions, large outfits will have legacy baggage of one sort or another); but a lot of smaller businesses have basically the same quality IT as home users(none at all, totally fucked); but with a good bit more money on the line.