Hey Google: Enable 3rd Party Enterprise App Development Like SalesForce Did
I interviewed Kraig Swensrud last week. He's an AppExchange developer who used the Salesforce.com platform to create the first SEM/CRM mashup known. (To me.)

I still intend to write up our conversation - which lasted an enjoyable hour and a half. Today though I want to write about a possible area of growth that I see for the mainstream search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN).

This opinion/fixation of mine is not based in an understanding of the enterprise software industry, but rather the emotion-based certainty that there's an enterprise market waiting for some foresightful search engine/online media company's enterprise app API for developers.

Lazy web: please point out the holes in my thinking.

The Framework:
Salesforce.com has a smart CEO named Marc Benioff who not only disrupted the enterprise application industry by creating a services model, but is credited for thinking up AppExchange while doing yoga on the beach (get the Business Week take from 2005).

AppExchange is several things:
- an enterprise application API (from my limited understanding it is primarily a CRM application)
- a ready marketplace (of over 350k subscribers per a 2005 article) for AppExchange developers
- a network of like-minded developers who can help and even integrate each others' work
- application integration w/each others' add ons
- intellectual support and advice for start ups (including events and a blog)
- something relatively old that I'm just now geeking over

search as enterprise app platform? ...nah - analytics makes more sense for Google at this point
Well, I'm not quite sure that a search algorithm would make for a great enterprise app platform, not the way that Salesforce, through CRM, does. Salesforce is so targeted to the needs of the enterprise that it leaves Google in the dust (based on my 2 day old understanding of the enterprise software market. Talking out of school is not only easy... it's a BLAST ;).

Google does, like Amazon, have incredible economies of database and processing scale though. They haven't yet tapped into these low costs the way Amazon did.

Still, I think Google should concentrate on building its own developer ecosystem around Google Analytics. Because it's analytics, far more than this fad we call paid search, that's at the core of our current direction in business.

To use the AppExchange model well, Google would have to ensure that developers can actually build a company around their add-on/plug-in. That's what I think is the core beauty of the AppExchange model. It's creating WHOLE COMPANIES.

Google, which is a fairly smart company, would likely find some way to leverage an enterprise-related search API as well. (Because developers in the space know what their various enterprise niches require.)

Yes there's the Google Appliance and what not, but for the love of pete someone tell them about the emerging enterprise application services model.

Google should start by working well with AppExchange (which they clearly do based on Kraig's description of working with them - and why not, it opens them up, through Kieden, to the entire Salesforce subscriber base).

MSN is better positioned to launch a 3rd party enterprise app developer ecosystem
MSN, in some of its divisions, is far more of an enterprise company than Google or Yahoo have ever been.

I know so little about MSN's participation in the enterprise application industry though that I will cut this little part of my rumination short - I'm talking even more wildly out of school here ;)

AppExchange vs. AdSense
For my search marketing brothers and sisters out there, AppExchange is a sort of AdSense, enabling developers (publishers) to sell application add-ons rather than click throughs from pages of ad-related content.

The only BIG success out of AdSense (that I know of) is Calcanis. That's because I'm not Jennifer Slegg (another success story... Jennifer also caught early wind of Google's move towards social search (co-op + notebook)).

That said, I think that the AppExchange ecosystem will turn out markedly fewer valueless offerings, such as type-in websites and blog-feed-based republishing networks.

Also I see in AppExchange more of a business-building network. Sort of like if Google had started both the WebMasterWorld and SearchEngineWatch forums for the burgeoning ecosystem it enabled.

My incredible idea that's so great I can't even believe it's here in my brain and not up there in the sky making the sun look dark
I want to invest in the start ups that are forming with the AppExchange API. Have you heard of Prosper? Prosper is rad. It enables lenders to make micro-investments in borrowers. I can lend as little as $50 bucks to people. You bid on the rate at which you're willing to lend at. Sometimes you get good deals.

I want to be able to make micro investments in the startups in the AppExchange network - those who are willing to take my micro-investments anyways (as well as the micro-investments from my legions of eager peers). Also I would like a little teensy chunk of their companies for my micro-investment so that if they ever get acquired I will get micro-rich.

Social venture funding if you will. So hey Prosper - get on the phone with AppExchange (or do they already offer this and I just haven't heard about it?).

wrapping up
I see in AppExchange - rather belatedly - what is really going to revolutionize enterprise online (the way that eBay revolutionized mom and pop businesses).

The recipe is simple. It only requires:
- an enterprise application API
- a ready marketplace for developers
- a network of like-minded developers who can help and even integrate each others' work
- application integration
- intellectual support and advice for start ups (including events and a blog)
- micro-investment

Further reading:
Salesforce.com Dreams On About eBay-Scale Success
SalesForce blog
Salesforce.com AppExchange Goes Mobile
Exclusive: Salesforce Business Mashups, New Developer Community
An eBay For Business Software

Anti-hyping is often as odious as pro-hyping (which I'm far more guilty of ;), but the following posts by Phil Wainewright helped me to better understand the AppExchange thoughtscape (despite the sneering):
AppExchange is so 1998
AppExchange critique strikes a chord

You KNOW you want to talk to me after reading THAT bit of hyper-brilliance. Holla: 919-433-3139.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |