google app engine

i tried to play with the new toy in town ... did not work for me however as my gmail account origins from the time when google faced the law suite in germany and had to rename the gmail.com accounts to googlemail.com. this very mail address now does not play with app engine (support is on it and comes up with new "try this..." things every day, very ambitions actually).
well, in the mean time i have two things working in my local development environment and tried to read a bit around what the rest of the world tells us about the whole buzz. interestingly the answers are not as enthusiastic as expected. honestly everyone waited for google to announce a cloud computing stack since amazon launched S3 and later EC2. with the latest promotion of amazon for their stack it was even more obvious that google will come up with something soon. so why don't we worship google and praise the new cloud platform?

well, some of us do, but there are some more critical voices out there and they get my full support. on o'reilly radar they try to be not too negative about google but some of the local voices down here paint a more drastic picture.

i guess we have to face it. google is the giant that tries to show us the nice side and really tries to be supportive to the internet but in the end google is not different to the other giants out there. it is simply impossible to be really big, make tons of money and still be a geeky bunch of guys trying to neglect the fact that business is the thing paying their bills. i really think that google tries to support the internet community but i think it is obvious that they try to do it in a way that primarily supports their business model. having tons of applications running on a application stack of google gives them a huge variety of ideas and already working projects that can be acquired and integrated with near to no effort. this is web2.0, make a quick and dirty thing, publish it at google app engine and hope that you get bought. this looks like a perfect fit for all those social network "applications" that float around. if you want to do real business and want to own your data, go somewhere else.