It was a packed house at the Business App Bootcamp yesterday (“Business Apps Are the New Black”).  Hundreds of people joined us at the Terra Gallery to talk about how to turn their great idea into an app, and every person I spoke with at the reception after told me they walked away with concrete next steps.  (See more pictures here.  Learn how to publish on the AppExchange here.)

My favorite part of the event was the number of hands that went up when I asked the audience who had an idea for an app.  It was almost all of them.  That’s the thing about this change from applications to apps: it’s catchy. People see value in it. People see opportunity.  (Read about the difference between applications and apps here.)

Developers often focus on the question, “What can I do?”  Entrepreneurs ask something different: “What should I do?”  When you’re thinking about an app, it’s the latter question that’s interesting.  The Salesforce Platform helps developers focus on the “should” by abstracting away the details behind the “can”.  That’s one of the big reasons I fell in love with it in the first place.

If you’re an app developer, the Salesforce Platform includes every business service you need to succeed in taking your app to market. There are many many (many) success stories, but we’re just at the beginning of this revolution.

Innovation — or better, re-invention — is really the key.  Users and businesses are hungry for solutions that give them focus and are context aware out of the box.  Developers who concentrate on expressing their domain expertise by creating great apps — and who skip over keeping-the-lights-on type development — will fare very well.

There are great things to come with enterprise apps.  Watch this space!