Opening the floodgates?

The Guardian reports that Tesco, everyone's favourite Evil Corporate Giant, is making an API available for it's online store. (here's what an API is).

While this might seem a little of a "so what", there's a few things that makes this powerful for me:

1) Tesco are crowd-sourcing ideas and technology. a brave move for a Corporate? I'd love to know how they're legal teams are feeling right now...

2) It means that Tesco might not try and develop their own apps for iPhone/Android/Firefox but allow the wider development community do this for them. Especially when you see they are doing TJam

3) If it takes off (and if third-party apps for a communication tool like twitter are anything to go by then it will) then we may well see the continued de-centralisation of information from the Corporate to the user. if this becomes mainstream, then you can see Tesco looking to exploit it (and that means across all their product lines) and also that people will expect it. If companies don't provide the tools for Third-Party apps, will they look like cave-dwellers?

That's my first thoughts on this a few minutes after I read the article. What do you think?

Can you see other uses for this or challenges we might face as a result?