Insights into how technology and the outsourcing of R&D are changing the software industry

I don’t think so.  At first when I saw the story on TechCrunch I thought there was going to be an exciting announcement — something that was going to help open up the Force.com platform in a way that would drive greater adoption of what’s probably the most mature Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering out there.  But much like the Force.com Sites announcement there’s little here to create any excitement.

More importantly, there’s nothing here that makes the platform more inviting to port existing applications from ISVs from the on-premise versions to on-demand.  For all the efficiency that the APEX language and their platform allow, there’s still nothing that makes it easy to move an application to Force.com and, in the unlikely case of a Coghead-like ending, nothing to make it easy to move the application and the data (and this does not even consider all the valuable meta data and clickstream information, but that could be another post on it’s own) back out to another platform — either on-demand or on-premise.