This news comes from this week’s Web 2.0 Expo, ending today. In addition to the basic premise of a storefront, Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek writes that Zoho, in launching such a venue, is not taking the customary percentage-based approach to application sales. Instead the company is choosing to deliver “100% of revenue from app sales,” with its moneymaking potential coming from charges to developers who “host large instantiations of...apps” with Zoho itself.
Wagner explains that “small users will be able to run the apps for free on Google’s servers.”
An inherently Ajax-based environment, Creator is able to provide the resources to establish custom CRM solutions and private file organizational utilities and so forth. Which in effect makes it a rather powerful designer. With the planned release of this store, Zoho is proving ever more the innovative maker of Web-based software. Surely Creator will prove more popular because of this new move.
I for one cannot recall if Zoho follows any other name into this foray. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken.) And given the breadth of options available within the bounds of Creator, it may well be the case that Zoho will see considerable traffic within the database market, for the simple fact that it is offering a venue through which third-party engineers can hawk their products. No doubt a number of them will be the result of databases never originally intended to be sold.