Google, Grids and great expectations

Google has finally unveiled its widely expected Amazon lookalike, as reported here on O'Reilly Radar among others (Link via Techdirt).

Tonight at their second CampFireOne Google Code is announcing App Engine, a hosted platform for web developers. The actual service will launch later tonight in a closed Beta. 10,000 developers will be granted access on a first come, first serve basis.

It's about time that developers get access to Google's platform! We've been hearing about Google's server farms and development tools for years. After Amazon Web Services started doing so well we all knew it was just a matter of time (next will be Microsoft we can can safely assume).

There are some worries, in that you have to be a Google account holder to use any service on it, which has "who is the Daddy" implications for customer ownership - but whats more interesting is the big picture potential economic impact. As Techdirt notes:

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.

If you add that to the thoughts on Coasian economics reducing transaction costs across the rest of the supply chain, it gets very interesting in other ways, as Fred Wilson et al note on the subject re startup ecosystem re-structuring.

The other thing that interests me is how this will integrate to Android and Open Social to give us that (Open?) Fixed Mobile Converged Social world we all forecast in our TechUtopian dreams.....