The Genius and Idiocy of Google’s App Engine / 04.08.08
There will be a lot of buzz and a ton of entries being written today about Google’s App Engine. I would like to comment on it since it was just last week where I looked at the possibility of Google going up against Amazon. Let me list the pros and cons first so you have an idea of how they compete.
Pros
- Fully hosted solution.
- Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.
- Scales automatically so no need to worry about bursts in traffic.
- Use of all Google APIs.
- Easy authentication.
Cons
- Full service solution. Unlike Amazon you can’t pick and choose which service you want to use. In the case of Chawlk we only needed to use Amazon’s S3 service to host files and that is it.
- Google has your source code.
- Google gets your customers.
In last week’s entry I wondered what the benefit of Google offering such services would be and now that I see how they are going about it this seems to be a play on gaining more users. The App Engine by default allows anyone that has a Google account to use your application. Want a quick and easy way to authenticate users? Have them login with their Google account and if they don’t have one they can sign up for one.
Think about that.
If they don’t have one they can signup for one. If they signup for an account they could be tempted to try out the many other Google services meaning more of a chance for Google to show off their ads. Showing off more ads leads to a greater chance of people clicking which means more revenue for Google.
I also wondered if they would go with the completely free route and they didn’t, they went with the freemium route. You can use App Engine free up to a specific amount of milestones and after that they being to charge. A smart move to get people on board.
Let us add to the fact that many of the applications built using this service will probably use Adsense to monetize what they have. From a developers perspective they are getting free hosting so monetizing with Adsense no matter how little they are paid would seem like a win to them.
Because they control their own ad inventory they can provide their services for free and place their ads on the services and receive 100% of the revenue. If they need more pages to fill with ads they can simply create another free service like they have with Ad Manager that appeals to publishers. Google’s problem isn’t going to be running out of ads, it is going to be running out of places to serve them.
They just encouraged developers to give them more pages to fill while also gaining more customers out of it. I can’t find any numbers, but from what I remember Yahoo Mail still had a huge lead over GMail for number of users. What better way to gain them then by letting others do it for you? It is genius.
If that is the case where does the idiocy come in? Well the idiocy has nothing to do with Google, but the developers who decide to take this route. Now I can see why it would be a very attractive option, but from what I can see you are handing everything over to Google. Your source code (sure we can believe Google would never touch it), your users and essentially your whole business. You might think I need a tinfoil hat for all the conspiracies I am conjuring up, but this should be a genuine concern to anyone because Google is still a public company that must keep investors happy last time I checked.
If I was a poor developer and thought I had an idea that could catch on quick and I didn’t want to worry about my infrastructure I would be very tempted by App Engine. There are pluses and minuses and I would have to weigh each accordingly. Although I didn’t believe Google would make a play against Amazon, I also didn’t see them taking this approach and it makes complete sense to me why they would do it. Amazon themselves would be wise to open up an Authentication API in my opinion.
The reason I don’t think it is a direct play against Amazon though is because they are limiting the language support to Python for right now (with more to follow) and other limitations. This is more of a business move to acquire a bigger audience for their services and ads.
Let the web services games being.