While the official blog seems to be indicate that they are targeting it to the Education market I do think the market will be bigger than that. looking at the video it seems to remind me and a few others of Visual Basic.
While Visual Basic was mocked around as a toy language it was a huge factor in getting Microsoft Developer mind share in the 1990's. It hid the monstrous Windows API from you and allowed you to put together applications rapidly. More importantly it allowed programmers to get productive very quickly.
I can go on talking about Visual basic as I spent quite few years of my career on it but that's another story.
What is exciting is that App Inventor can unleash a whole new set of programmers onto the Android platform and give Google the same edge that Microsoft had in the nineties. The availability of an army of developers combined with a vibrant market for third party components (VBX, Activex,...) simply destroyed the market leader (Powerbuilder) and a host of other competitors (Uniface,GuptaSQL, Delphi,Developer2000) simply fell by the wayside.
True the dynamics and usage patterns of the mobile market are different from the PC market and the client server era but some of the fundamentals still remain the same. Platforms that have a huge developer base will have a huge market edge. With a lot of the handset makers moving to Android and with 200,00 activations per day Google definitely seems to have made the right moves. And while I am reading the tea leaves Hello Android
book is No 2 in the Software Development list at Amazon.So will App Inventor live up to it's hype? Watch this space as I wait impatiently for access to the Platform.
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