The Office App Store provides another opportunity to tap into the Microsoft ecosystem, delivering apps directly to users of the most used productivity suite .
Office 2013 brings with it more than just a new design and delivery model. But Microsoft isn't making a big deal about this third feature. In addition to the bold changes in their flagship product's UI and the decision to deliver Office via a SaaS model to the home user, Microsoft has unveiled the
Office App Store, which allows developers to deliver plugins to Microsoft Office via a Marketplace that is somewhat akin to the Windows Store.
Office 2013 Apps are delivered via HTML and leverage a JavaScript API for interacting with the running app. Because of the HTML delivery, Office Apps can run within the desktop versions of Office 2013 as well as the new Office Web Apps. Not to mention they can theoretically run on any other platform that Office 2013 might be delivered to.
In order to get people excited about building Office Apps, Microsoft has also
announced a contest which has an attractive grand prize of $10,000 dollars to the top app.