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.

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.