SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

Google has made a few bold moves into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and application API space recently. And, most notably the announcement of the Salesforce.com cooperation rolls this strategy to the end users. As Tier1's Phil Shih phrases it: "Salesforce and Google go after SMB market more aggressively; hosters beware".

Matt Asay points out on his blog that Google may be at an inflection point of having to commit to either Open Standards or becoming evil after all. Ars Technica's Clint Ecker feels that the lock-in strategy is at full steam already, as he thinks that the PaaS move "... most blatant downside is being locked into Google's platform."

These moves seem to have the pretty obvious strategy of locking down the Internet to a certain vendor. This is capitalism, after all, which means competition and control. The real danger lies in the more indirect effects of some of Google's advances. With the announcement of "The Users API", Google is sneaking in a platform to grab customers away from Hosters, Telcos, Internet Companies and Service providers. Tim Bray makes the point in his "ongoing" blog by saying: Use the User API "...and now you’re a sharecropper on the Google plantation.". ZDNet's Dana Gardner goes one step further and calls this the "Gangsta cloud wars".

At the end of the day this is about getting hold of the customers of the current service providers. Currently they own, know and service them locally - the latter an advantage that is not easy to take away. But giving away the ownership and knowledge about their own customers, and thus becoming a sharecropper for Google will result in the ultimate demise. Open Source and SaaS may come to the rescue - if the new offerings are built on truly open platforms and applications.