Back to business?

Last week, the office of the president elect launched "Open for Questions", a way for the people to let the transition team know what's on their mind. I am not really a very political guy, and this is going to stay a tech-centered blog. However, I believe this particular event has an interesting aspects that warrants mentioning (and I am not talking about the grassroot efforts that made a pot-related question score higher than national security or economy-related asks).

If you take a look at the site itself, you can the following disclaimer:

This tool is powered by Google Moderator, a third party service.

I would like to repeat: change.gov used Google Moderator, an App Engine based application, to process the almost one million votes on roughly ten thousand questions. Upon closing the first session of questions posed, the team commented

We're tremendously excited about the promise of tools like this that offer Americans a level of access that has historically been hard to come by. By voting questions up, users have been able to convey to our team which major issues -- like the auto industry, health care, ethical standards, and others -- are the most important to this community.

The same week, a post on the App Engine blog announces a library for easier integration with Salesforce, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for enterprise developers. As the blog states,

It's fantastic to see App Engine gaining traction in the world of enterprise software--whether you want to deploy a browser-based tool to members of your organization or a personalized, customer-focused app that scales to millions of users, App Engine's ease of use and scaling power make it an ideal choice for enterprise development.

What do these two events have in common (besides App Engine, of course)? They demonstrate that Google App Engine has many more applications than being an inexpensive way of hosting your homepage or serving as backend for OpenSocial apps. While I do not doubt that there are very successful consumer-focused applications that can make a lot of money through ads, I think the biggest source of revenue for most software vendors out there is the enterprise. Microsoft Office and Exchange are great examples of how selling to businesses throughout the world can be a very, very, very profitable thing to do. But one does not need to be the next Microsoft to make a decent living. From finance to organizing one's company offsite, there are many markets to create and sell applications to the working crowd. Unlike Moderator for change.gov, they usually have a very restricted user base -- scalability is a little bit less of a concern, and useage per company might even be low enough to fall into App Engine's free quota. Also, since App Engine works out of the box with Google Apps for business, many infrastructural problems like how to integrate a company's SAML login with your cloud app, are already taken care of.

The biggest problem for turning an idea for a business app into a business for apps right now seems to be the question of installation. Google already has a marketplace that lets you install Moderator for your domain. While there is not a great way yet to do something similar with your own app, the marketplace does have a "become a vendor" link that one can use to promote his or her own Google related services. Service vendors can use this venue to promote what they have to offer, and their customers can express their satisfaction through rating and feedback. It seems like a good place to get the word out if you have a great business App on App Engine. Installation would still be manual though (you would need to create a new application instance for each domain). I'm kindof curious -- has anyone out here tried this out (or something similar)? Are there any alternative ways of promoting your business app that I have missed? Please do not hesitate add comments to this post.