Everywhere I go on the web I'm seeing an ad for Google Cloud Platform.

I actually have clicked on the link a few times. (Might be the first time I've ever clicked on an ad link.)

Their algorithms have correctly inferred that I'm actively making decisions in this area now. And those decisions will influence my spending for (knock wood) many months or years into the future. They may even influence the purchasing decisions of other server users. In other words, it's a good time for them to be flooding me with their Good News.

My longtime friend Doc Searls has a vision for commerce on the Internet that's very much two-way. If you recall, Doc is the guy who famously coined the term "Markets are Conversations." Here's what Doc means, in the context of Google's Cloud Platform and me.

Dear Google -- I find the idea of your Cloud Platform very appealing. But I can't use it, because I'm doing all my server-side development in Node.js at this time, and it's missing from what you offer in Cloud Platform.

This omission seems interesting, because it's Google's JavaScript technology that makes Node.js possible! Maybe you have a different vision for how JS code should run in the cloud? Or perhaps you don't feel that JS makes sense in a server environment? Or perhaps you think JS is an egregious hack, and you want to, for strategic reasons, to push the other runtimes? If any of that is true, I would like to urge you not to give into that kind of thinking! The market has spoken, there's a lot of development energy going into Node. You could even say it's the consensus platform for server development going forward.

Short version: If you supported Node.js, I would probably be a customer.

That's me, the market, responding to the persistent offer that Google keeps making. They could save their money on the ads aimed at me, I'm already sold on the idea. However, until they support Node, I can't be a customer.

Sincerely,

The other side of the market

Update: People tell me that Google's Compute Engine has Node.js. A quick search didn't uncover any docs explaining how it works.