Platform as a Service is the new Web 3.0?

Salesforce.com looks like it is staking its claim on Web 3.0 as well (here are some more claimants), with the view that Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the New Web 3.0;

“We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” declares Benioff, citing his own company’s Force.com, along with Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Facebook as examples. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

The link above is from an article on ZDNet from Phil Wainewright., who goes on to note that:

One of the most striking aspects of Benioff’s new message is that it’s no longer about trying to get everyone using Salesforce.com’s platform. Showing a slide with logos from 21 different PaaS providers, he (Benioff) acknowledges the emerging diversity of the PaaS landscape: “The hallmark of all these platforms of a service is that different ones serve different markets and different developers.” Facebook serves the consumer, Amazon targets LAMP stack developers, Google App Engine is for Python developers, while Force.com serves the enterprise market, he explains.

And as Phil notes, luckily the hype curve of PaaS has been infilled in the nick of time:

Just in the nick of time, it turns out that industry analyst Gartner has just published a new Application Server Magic Quadrant report, which includes Force.com as its first ever PaaS participant (Gartner by the way uses the term APaaS, which stands for application platform as a service).

There is definitely something in the air - we started a major piece of work (just finished) dealing with SaaS/PaaS type services about 3 months ago, and PaaS had hardly even been coined then. But over the last 2 months or so there has been an absolute rush with Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Yahoo, Amazon, Verizon and others all pushing out announcements about PaaS style plays.

Whether these platforms are as open as is so breathlessly claimed is another matter entirely of course, in fact one of the conclusions we came to was that there is "open" as in the customers are on my service - and "open" as in the customers are on your service. And once the customers are on my service, I get (i) a bigger say in what "Open" is and (ii) I own the customer relationship, the metadata and (potentially) the data too - hence the unseemly rush to the pumps. The other issue of course is whether one can actually run a thin client SaaS service in an Enterprise environment. Twitter going down is one thing, whether one can run without on site service is still to be proven.

But practicality aside, does it mean that Enterprise 2.0 has been re-bottled as Web 3.0 now