Sorry, but I don't agree. I guess that's because I am not interested in a free hosting company. I need a professional platform provider that I can base business applications on. If you are someone interested in making an application for your friends and family, then we are perhaps not talking about the same thing.
On this forum, the "you are not paying" argument has been used over and over. But I am NOT paying Microsoft to notify me of downtimes of their SSDS service. Not paying them to inform me of their roadmap. The Microsoft Chief Technology Officer himself will be announcing the next step on their cloud offering in October. There is good communication over there, which certainly can be improved but even when they can't say something, they tell us why and on what date they will release the information, providing the needed clarity. Google has been notorious for poor communication on many of their consumer-oriented applications, but when it comes to business applications, that is just not good enough. And since I am building a business application, that is the standard I judge them on. The reason why Amazon is praised, I believe, is not because they have the perfect answer, but because they had the guts to call their product 1.0 and go with it. But let's look at your argument. Let's compare with other services out there (free or otherwise). Can you name any who has a policy as poor as Google's when it comes to quota? I can't think of any big name. A hosting company that says you can host here, but when you get a sudden spike in requests, they'll shut down your site for the rest of the day, even if you are not over quota on any metric. Who else does that? How could that ever be web 2.0-ish. And Google is not in competing with the free or obscure services, they are competing for the business market with Amazon, Microsoft and soon Yahoo! and likely others as well. It does not matter if they have a different business model. Who they compete with is evident from their announced pricing schemes. Google is in competition with those services TODAY, not tomorrow or next year, and waiving the beta flag is no excuse. Every day, people are deciding which platform to develop for. Talking about what is coming at what time, helps people to decide whether they are willing to walk with you on that trip to release to market. The "technology preview" argument was good back in March, but today, it no longer is. Google has real experience since then, and there is nothing preventing it from communicating. Secrecy doesn't help them defend against competitors, the better communication with competitors is exactly why they are losing developers. Going live at the end of the year seems unlikely given the amount of serious problems that remain unaddressed. But the cloud is not waiting around for Google to be ready. This is not a market dominated by Google, and in fact Google does not even have the best cards. They do not have the best track record in the industry for attracting developers. What is worse, public and private companies abroad are notoriously scared of keeping data on Google's (US-based!) machines precisely because the company is all about information processing, and because of US legislature. Moreover, Google is unknown as platform to the CIO's and IT managers. So they are effectively the underdog, who need to be substantially better than the competition to even have a chance at cracking the business market. What they do have is a smart scaling method, an early integrated hosting environment and an early jump to market, which gives them some leverage. I fear they are loosing their early jump as others are moving faster, and I'm pretty sure competitors are working on smarter scaling and better integration methods too. And I am one of those in the business arena who actually is a strong pro supporter of Google. Filip. On Aug 28, 6:59 pm, Wooble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 28, 12:27 pm, Filip <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > But most worrying to me is the Google Quota system. When Google does > > metrics on the uptime of their service, they should not count the > > uptime of their service, but the availability of their service to me, > > that is what matters to me. In particular, it is totally unacceptable > > that a GAE-based site becomes unreachable for minutes, let alone for > > hours or better parts of the day. Clearly, attacks should be avoided > > by denying traffic when it ramps up suspiciously fast, but bringing > > down the customer's site all together is out of the question. > > It's not a customer's site. You're not Google's customer until you > start paying them, and when you start paying them the quotas won't > bring down your site because you'll be paying them for the usage over > the quota. Instead of comparing their free preview service to S3, try > comparing it to any other free hosting service out there. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
