Will open up a lot more opportunities for mobile business app startups too.
Mobile in enterprise is often seen as lagging behind consumer use - but senior execs in my experience are already a lot further ahead on mobile use for stats/monitoring than many probably appreciate - getting broader uptake across an enterprise usually stalls at deployment and user support.
The second is unlikely to be true for a very long time, if ever, and is merely wishful thinking. It would equally be wishful thinking if someone thought that enterprises would specify iOS only or SailFish only.
I'm trying to build a video capture program and a google tv app that talk to each other so I can stream video around our LAN. The video capture box would probably be in the $1000 range. Then each tv that wants to see that stream would only need a $100 Vizio Google TV box and the private android app. Now that I know I can build an app that won't be in the public Play store, but will be accessible easily to accounts on our domain, I can make that app much more specific.
I could see this being really popular with companies who use a lot of TVs for signage. The first thing that comes to mind for me is all the TVs in airports showing departure and arrival information.
(I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to build a pseudo-Market over the GDrive APIs for such uses. Might look into that at some point.)
I'm not familiar with the Apple or Windows Phone platforms. Do they have anything similar?
On the downside of googles program, it appears to rely on a company using google apps (basically the corporate version of Gmail, which runs under your own domain). I understand not many companies use this - its definitely not as popular as say - exchange.
The B2B program is more for bulk purchase of custom apps.
Sometimes a fanciful name is better than a logical name because it decreases the risk of ambiguity among consumers (and so you don't end up in legal battles over very generic sounding names as can be seen with both Apple and Amazon using App Store). It also means their scope isn't limited by their name and they can move into new markets.
Apple, Amazon, Google, and many others all have company names that make no sense and I vastly prefer that to the more accurate names Consumer Electronics or Search Corporation.
I think they meant play as in playground
If an enterprise is Android-only, the Google solution is OK. If you're really doing a corporate deployment, something like Zenprise is a better way to go.
You can't host either Google Play or Chrome Store, but you can write your own and install apps from them.
There are many other Android appstores around - most phone vendors and carries have one, many large enterprises have their own and there are a number of 3rd party ones.
I don't think there are any other Chrome stores but I suspect that has more to do with the lack of use Chrome apps have.
I assume Google decided on "Play" over "Market" for other reasons.