Google Finally Realizes It Needs To Be The Web Platform

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Tue, Apr 8th 2008 12:27am — Mike Masnick

Way back in 2004, we started asking when Google was going to become "the web platform," finally opening up its infrastructure to build out new and useful applications. It seemed obvious at the time that the next real battle was going to be in that space, but time and time again, Google has missed opportunities to do so, opening up a window of opportunity for other players. Surprisingly, the closest to realizing the vision has been Amazon.com with its Amazon Web Services offerings -- which was something no one would have expected back in 2004. Back then, the questions were more about Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Microsoft, however, can't seem to get past its desktop software DNA (though, it talks a good game) and Yahoo! (typical Yahoo!) has bits and pieces here and there but can't seem to pull together a comprehensive web platform strategy. For a brief period of time, it looked like Facebook might become a true web platform, but it's been too focused on locking apps in rather than enabling outbound efforts.

So, now, finally, nearly four years later, Google has come to its senses and announced its entrance into the web platform space with its aptly named AppEngine offering. In many ways, it's similar to Amazon's offering (which is a good thing!), though much more integrated, which could prove to be either a problem or a benefit depending on what you want to do. Amazon allows for a much more a la carte setup, which could appeal to many, while you have to really embrace Google to enjoy the benefits of its setup. A big open question is pricing. A huge part of the appeal to Amazon's Web Services platform is that it's crazy cheap. You really have to be working it quite hard to build up any sort of significant charges. Google hasn't released info on pricing yet, offering AppEngine up for free to the first 10,000 developers (who appear to have snapped up all the open slots in less than two hours). That free service has some limitations: initially 500 MBs of storage and enough bandwidth to serve approximately 5 million pages per month. There's some suggestion that the final service will always be free up to that level, with charges starting if you go beyond that. If so, that could certainly appeal to people who just want to try some stuff out for free.

While this may seem like something that will only appeal to serious techheads, this could be a really big deal. A lot is going to depend on how well AppEngine really works, and how open it really turns out to be. However, if it really does provide another super cheap (or even free at low levels) full service, highly scalable platform for all different kinds of applications, things could start to get very interesting pretty quickly. Between this and Amazon's Web Services, the very concept of developing online applications may finally start to change in significant ways for the better. The easier it is to develop and deploy highly scalable web applications, the more innovative and creative solutions we're going to start to see.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: apis, appengine, application development, hosting, web platform, web services
Companies: amazon, google

19 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Terry, 8 Apr 2008 @ 3:22am

I read aboout this. I didn't realize it was taking so long for them to finally push this out.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Terry, 8 Apr 2008 @ 3:23am

I read aboout this. I didn't realize it was taking so long for them to finally push this out.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
free press release, 8 Apr 2008 @ 3:51am

technical limitations
their service seems to be limited to one flavor of LAMP that is Python. Atleast that is what I understood from reading other blogs. Python may be the best, but they must start supporting other technologies like PHP, Ruby and Java for mass adoption.

Webmaster,
PressReleasePoint
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Shohat, 8 Apr 2008 @ 4:09am

Dumbest move ever.
1) They didn't just "realize". Now would probably just be the best timing, since web apps are all the rage now, with every microscopic site providing an API, and every other retard releasing a Twitter application.

2) Dumbest move ever is going "we are niche" and supporting only Python. Why ? !Maybe! - Because PHP is too Zend, Java is too Sun, and .NET (any ) is too MS.
But still, a dumb move.
Welcome to Google Answers, Google Video, Google Base, Google Groups (yes .) ,Google Product Search, Google NoteBook, Google Checkout and everything else that is Google Dead.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- mobiGeek, 8 Apr 2008 @ 6:45am
  
  Re: Dumbest move ever.
  How can the choice of a language be considered "the dumbest move ever"? Completely ludicrous statement.
  
  And apparently 10,000 entities disagreed with your statement in less than 2 hours.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
CyberPope, 8 Apr 2008 @ 5:18am

Dosn't seem to be ready yet! LOL
I went to Google to check it out. When I tried signing up, it said that they were not ready to open it up beyond the beta. I then decided to scope out what others have done. There was not a lot in the gallery yet. Numerous categories were empty. I found a little pixel editor, and when I went to try it out I got an error that this app engine is serving over its quota! LOL

Here is the link to the app I tried.
http://dot.appspot.com/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 8 Apr 2008 @ 7:53am

Am I missing something? Seems late...
How is this any different than a GoDaddy Hosting Account?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- chris (profile), 8 Apr 2008 @ 9:33am
  
  Re: Am I missing something? Seems late...
  uhh, it's from google and google is awesome. godaddy is not google, therefore godaddy is not awesome.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Amaethon, 8 Apr 2008 @ 9:32am

Why?
Why is this such a big deal? Congratz, they are providing web hosting. I get the same from x10 except that I have a little banner ad, but get the works instead of Python.

On another note, from a techie, why do people keep making up new 'buzz words' for something that has been around for ages already. Web App Platform, WTF is this crap???
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Etch, 8 Apr 2008 @ 11:55am
  
  Re: Why?
  lol I agree. I think the real news isn't the product, its the naming!
  We now have a new buzz word for web hosting: Web App platform
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Noah Callaway, 8 Apr 2008 @ 9:51am

Good Move
This is a good move by Google. They have greatly simplified the process of getting a web app up and running. This is *not* the same as GoDaddy hosting, or x10, or any of the other common LAMP hosting services out there.

First, their decision to support "only" Python is somewhat misleading. If you watch the video they repeatedly state that Python is the "first" supported language. I'm guessing they'll get to work on bringing in other languages...

Second, this is not the standard GoDaddy hosting account. Most "normal" hosting accounts give you a machine (or a virtual machine, or space on a machine, etc). Often they'll set up the LAMP stack for you. However, you are on your own in terms of the rest of the configuration and scalability.

Google's offering takes all the configuration issues away. You have to play within their API's (since you cannot see the underlying machine), but writing a web app has been simplified to "download SDK; write code." This is the normal paradigm developers usually fall into.

As well, your applications are suddenly scalable (in theory, just as scalable as Google, GMail, etc). Of course they put up a artificial limit, since Google doesn't want to burn all of it's resources on a single web-app. But those limits *are* artificial.

You could argue that the limits put in place by GoDaddy (or any other) hosting plans are also artificial. But the hard limits (the absolute scalability of those other services) can't come close to Google. They just don't hold a candle.

So if you write the next youtube, you'll be able to scale your app simply and easily.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 8 Apr 2008 @ 10:49pm
  
  Re: Good Move
  if you write the next youtube, you'll be able to scale your app simply and easily.
  
  If I write the next youtube, I should want goals of investors and to go public. As much as I like GOOG, I don't want to not amass more fortunes for them.
  
  They should need me, not the other way around. Understand?
  
  To be locked into Python seems silly when GoDaddy has easy to use admin interface, about 30 opensource programs ready to load (You might as well call it SaaS) and other choices such as Win/Linux/MySQL/MSSQL/SMTP/PHP4/PHP5/Ruby/JSP/SSL/.COM/MyOwnBrand,Inc/kitchen sink for less than the cost of a soda a day. I also maintain full ownership of my code.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
indafog, 8 Apr 2008 @ 10:47am

I'm with Anonymous Coward
All I can say is "big deal?" One more webhosting site. Google expands. Woopee! They seem to be the starbucks of the cyberworld.

Can't you tell I'm really excited?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Nicholas Wright (profile), 8 Apr 2008 @ 11:09am

Haha.
You haters have clearly not watched the demo video. This service is going to rock out loud. It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to get there in time to get a beta account.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Peter pumpkin eater, 8 Apr 2008 @ 12:17pm
  
  Re: Haha.
  Huh? It looks like a web dev IDE that works with Python, and the demo did not have python syntax checking.
  
  I'll stick with vi.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 8 Apr 2008 @ 12:39pm
    
    Re: Re: Haha.
    Seriously?
    
    No.
    
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2478268455022338217&q=google+app+engine&total=1 50&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
    
    Watch the video. There's no editor involved in Google AppEngine. You can use vi, or emacs, or textpad, or whatever you want.
    
    Why don't people understand what this is?
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- mano, 8 Apr 2008 @ 8:28pm
  
  Re: Haha.
  After being denied the a/c I opted to be invited when they are ready for more and I got the account invitation in a matter of minutes!
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Charming Charlie, 8 Apr 2008 @ 9:19pm

I'm glad to see there is as much confusion in the comments as in my head.

Mike, assuming you see it within the purview of techdirt, it would be a really good idea to make a post explaining the basics and underlying issues regarding this current news. It would be to this business/tech development what your economics of zero and IP series are to their respective business and law developments.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Mike (profile), 9 Apr 2008 @ 2:38am
  
  Re:
  Mike, assuming you see it within the purview of techdirt, it would be a really good idea to make a post explaining the basics and underlying issues regarding this current news.
  
  That's a good idea... I've saved it to my notes, but probably won't get to it for a while.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]