On 3/29/06, Rob Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Then, basically they provide 50 gmail accounts for your domain and have > a web based admin to manage those. You can add more but it's not > guaranteed while it's in beta. Gmail is nice, though, in that the users > can POP messages from it. So in a way, it's not much different than if > it were hosted by your or by gmail, except you do get the gmail > interface to it.
It's pretty clear that they are going to move into commoditiy webhosting as well as commodity mailhosting, and as far as i'm concerned that can only be a good thing. What I'm curious about is are they going to make a play for the applications market? Google is one of the few groups that has the technical skills and the resources to bring a hosted applications grid style thing to market. Consider the following scenario, you have built a neat little web application that people like and that is at least moderately profitable in it's first incarnation (it brings in barely more than it costs to run); then it becomes insanely popular. Now you have problems, and most likely you'll end up selling out in one form or another to afford to do the things that you will need to do to scale the app to meet demand. Not to mention growing pains, and if you navigate through the maze you end up having to build multiple redundant data centers, your own backhaul network, etc,etc,etc. How could Google (or anyone else) help you with this? Warning: here is where we get seriously speculative The strong option: Google lets you host a full operating system image on their grid, instances are created on a prefork basis to anticipate demand, the programming environment is similar to what you get on a single instance on raw hardware, with a few exceptions, like logging, and your database setup might be constrained. The not nearly as strong option: Google lets you host an 'application image' on their grid, you have to use their programming model, and the learning curve is steep, instances are created on a per request or per session basis. Call it the .NET version The weak option: Your application exists as a configuration of standard components, the programming model is deliberately limited and pitched towards the nonprofessional, call it the Myspace version. There is already an outfit http://www.ning.com/ doing something somewhere between the second two options. And I had hopes that Sun would be offering something like the strong option (i think Sun has sucked too much NSF and DOD teat to take public facing apps seriously any more; and their grid offering is compute oriented rather than service oriented). Any how, that's my brain dump, back to work.
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