[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> One thing you have to remember it is not what Guido or the engineers
> want. If Google App Engine is to succeed it is what the customers
> want. If it is designed as you have stated it will never recoup what
> Google has spent so far let alone down the road. Google App Engine has
> so many many limitations. Regardless if the limitations are by design
> or not it is virtually unusable by 99% of all developers. Can Google
> make a business off the remaining 1%?
The question of whether Google can turn Google App Engine into a
profitable business doesn't depend on what percentage of developers
find it useful, but whether Google exploit a competive advantage.
Google could've started up a tradtional web hosting service using
popular SQL databases and other techonologies and created something
that would have had a much broader appeal. Any one could. That's the
problem. Google might be able to grab market share, but without
anything to distiguish themselves from their competitors, a best they
only get a marginal return on their investment.
We can only speculate on what Google business plan for GAE is, but it
seems pretty obvious to me that leveraging Google's own internal
technologies is at the heart of it. A number of limitations and
problems with GAE stem from technologies like Big Table, Google
Frontend and Google Apps. Another part of their plan appears to be
keeping support costs low, so you're not given much rope to hang
yourself (or others). If, in the long term, Google can't make a
business following this plan, if it doesn't give them enough a
competive advanage, then there's probably no way they can make the
kind profits from a hosting service that Google's investors expect.
(While it's not terribly relevent to this discussion, I suspect Google
has some other goals for GAE that don't deal directly with its
viability as a business. One is to educate programmers in the Google
way of doing things. I'm sure Google has been fustrated with tons of
amazing job applicants with advanced degrees, 10+ years of WWW
experience, and the inability work with anything but PHP and SQL.
Another is that they want to make even easier for people to create WWW
sites, the sort of small little sites that through AdWords/AdSense,
Google has made billions.)
Ultimately, what matters is what you want and what Google is willing
give you. It doesn't matter what 99% developers want. The are number
of problems and limitations with GAE that will be fixed. You can look
at the issue database to get and idea of what these are. However,
there are no timelines, so don't plan anything being fixed tommorow or
even a year from now. Many limitations will always be there. You're
never going to get all the functionality of an SQL database, nor will
GAE be suitable for computationally intensive tasks.
Look at a GAE, and see if it offers it what you want as it is now. If
it's close but not quite there maybe play around with it, maybe go so
far as making a proof of concept of something. On the other hand, if
GAE is far away from what you want, then walk away. GAE isn't for
you, and probably won't ever be. Maybe check back in a year or so,
but now you should be looking for another hosting solution.
Ross Ridge
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