My $0.02 cents (old model, $0.08 new Google estimate, $1.00 other user estimates).
Having done a lot of work in finance for a large tech company, my main disappointment with the new pricing is the me-too approach from Google. Great engineering, but very lax with respect to innovation for the whole product. In this case pricing. GAE had promised more of an activity-based model. Great I thought, an application of Activity Based Costing to a business. ABC is truly a gift for businesses WTR good decision making. However, the discipline needed to apply it often goes lacking. The main area where the lack of discipline applies is upper management decision making. ABC is a disciplined approach to running your business. It lays bare good operations, and forces poor management decisions into the open -- which is why upper managers hate it. Anyway, enough theory. Here's the example the applies to GAE. The $0.01 charge per 10,000 files. For nearly the entire time I've been in this forum, I've heard Ikai and others describe the efficiency and sophistication of GAE content delivery network. "Use static files because of our great efficiency" or something like that. Unless I'm mistaken, there is nothing that would suggest using ABC that the number of files drives costs at $0.01 per 10K. Another take on this is a question someone asked long ago in the forums about why static files bandwidth charges under High Replication got the higher bandwidth charge when the system used to deliver the bandwidth is THE SAME system used for Master/Slave. Never answered of course. The penny per 10K files is simply Google lazily looking at AWS and saying, "Hey, this is how we can really juice the profit, and compare well with AWS." The problem with these types of decisions that the pricing system becomes arbitrary, and guided ultimately by board-room decisions rather than operating discipline. I'm happy that GAE is upping its pricing as it is a clear indication that this may become a viable P/L driven business. However, seeing this type of mee-too-ism in the pricing area rather than something such as the original promise from GAE strongly suggests that Google sees little value in hiring great accountants in addition to great engineers is disappointing. I say that having been part of Hewlett Packard during its great years in InkJet printers where things like ABC delivered incredible value for consumers, and then seeing that morph into a company that stopped being disciplined, and started to think solely about how to juice its quarterly profits. Google is simply coming out the gates appearing like the sad shell of a company I left. Larry suggests he's not a quarterly-profit focused guy, but this pricing tells me that he doesn't understand how things like taking the simple route on pricing decisions because you don't think great decision-based accounting systems are important MAKES YOUR ORGANIZATION LAX. </rant mode> Still happy, and somewhat trustful of GAE. Sorry to see that the pricing decisions look mostly like "...this compares well to AWS." Oh well. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
