New From Google: Google Acquisition Engine
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 8, 2008 at 12:00 AM PT
Here’s a clever way of streamlining the acquisition process: Become a platform-as-a-service provider and encourage developers to create Web applications using your proprietary database and your APIs (application programming interfaces).
That seems to be what Google (GOOG) has done with App Engine, a new service for developers who’d like to write and run their Web applications on the company’s infrastructure. With App Engine developers can establish their own little Google Labs outposts, building Google-friendly applications using Google’s own building blocks on the Google File System and Google will handle the scaling and fail-over issues.
That’s a compelling proposition–assuming you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment. And who wouldn’t these days? What better way to pique the search giant’s acquisitive interests than building a great big Web 2.0 sandcastle in its very own Web 2.0 sandbox? Who knows, you may be the next YouTube or, at the very least, the next Zingku or Jaiku. And if it turns out that you are, how convenient would it be for Google to acquire you, as Dave Winer noted a while back at Scripting News:
How much would it be worth to buy companies without having to transition their technology to their platform? There would be no retraining either, all the programmers in the companies they acquire would know how to work in the environment. Further, can you imagine that they’d charge universities to teach comp sci using their cloud?
“Given the cost of acquisitons, recruiting and training they can afford to blow a lot of money on free bandwidth, storage and CPU to make the buying and hiring process more efficient and increase the hit rate (the percentage of programmers who work out).”
Comments
Well, that certainly explains forcing everyone to Python. Does that mean they will NEVER support Rails though?
Posted by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at April 8th, 2008 at 9:33 amI don’t think that Python is a lock-in strategy, there are certain languages that can provide the full benefit of cloud computing and some that can’t. I expect you’ll see the languages that Google uses internally supported first (Python, Java). Does Google use Ruby for any of it’s applications?
Posted by Ed Anuff at April 8th, 2008 at 12:29 pmGeez, doesn’t anybody read the original articles? Python-only is a short term situation. Free entry level is a permanent situation (at least according to Google documentation). Seems like a lot of bad info started out over at a ZD blog and has been parroted elsewhere.
In any event, I dispute the conclusions reached (at length in my blog and the ValleyWag article).
While there is no doubt that will make it easier for Google to Cherry-pick good applications, do you REALLY think that is a big sticking point to their strategies? For most of these things the code could be re-written from scratch while the pointy haired bosses are still haggling over the price.
Take a deep breath. Think about it a little.
Rackspace, companies like them, and all the middle-man “hosting” companies that sell disk space and CPU cycles by the pound are the one who’s business models vanish if this catches on.
And if you have ever dealt first-hand with some of these vermin, you will realize that this makes the world a better place.
I anticipate several other large companies to follow suite. MS and Amazon are certainly positioned to do so, as is Rackspace for that matter, they just have to re-define what their service actually consists of and who their primary customers might be.
Posted by Mac Beach at April 8th, 2008 at 2:43 pmMac, I absolutely read it. But they don’t say what languages they will eventually support, nor when, and based on Gmail being in beta for over four years now, I expect nothing different.
Why would Amazon want to “follow suit?” Google is chasing THEM, not the reverse. Amazon offers a real virtual machine, and charges only based on what services you will use. Why should I pay for Big Table if I don’t use it? Amazon doesn’t lock developers into a specific API. If I were still doing development, the choice would be obvious, and it certainly wouldn’t be GAE.
@Ed My understanding is that Ruby in any form is not used internally at Google. Which makes me wonder if they’ll ever support it in GAE at all.
Posted by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at April 9th, 2008 at 7:14 am