SalesForce.com: "The Infrastructure is the Product"

SalesForce.com announced on Monday that it's making its proprietary APEX programming language available to customers and third party developers. The folks at InfoWorld and ZDNet say it's big news. Now users can customize SalesForce's hosted apps rather than running them as-is. I thought you might also be interested in Nicholas Carr's analysis:

Last year, I questioned Salesforce's decision to run its software-as-a-service application on its own infrastructure rather than have that infrastructure hosted by a hardware utility. [ThePlanet-EV1's Doug Erwin made the same point during our HostingCon video panel , BTW.] Now, I understand the rationale for the decision: the infrastructure is the product.

What Salesforce is doing is certainly part of a big tsunami in business computing, a tsunami that does indeed mark the transition away from the client-server age into what I've called the third age of IT. At the center of that age will stand not the PC but the utility-class data center, providing companies with at once greater efficiency and greater flexibility.

In other news, I was flipping through the Economist on the plane and read about Fulfillment by Amazon. Yep, Amazon now offers inventory warehousing, shipping and returns processing - in addition to web hosting.

So, SalesForce.com = hosting + customizable applications. Amazon.com = hosting + logistics. Will web hosting companies be able to compete by offering web hosting + nothing else? Hostway's John Martis says absolutely; he thinks hosting as we know it has a long life ahead. Nonetheless, might it be worthwhile to start thinking about what's next?