Avoiding the pile-on on Techmeme

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 by Dave Winer.

The last few years when something new hits the tech blogosphere, I usually kick back and think while so many others scramble for position on Techmeme. I find that by doing this I can usually find the nugget that they're all missing, assuming it's an area I'm interested in, of course, and know something about.  

So I'm still hanging back, but wanted to post a couple of thoughts about Google's AppEngine announcement last night. 

1. It's not going to wipe out Amazon. Amazon has a huge lead, and that lead is worth a lot. But it is going to change how Amazon thinks about their market, and it's good news for developers that they have competition. That means better deals for us. It already does, because as I predicted, and rationalized, Google's offering is free, although the limits are pretty limiting. (500MB of storage means you could do a calendar or a spreadsheet, but not an email app with enclosures, or an RSS storage app with enclosures. Data is big these days. How many megabytes is a code update from Apple?) 

2. I'm really fucking pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions of dollars on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making all developers investments apply to the net the same way Google is. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn't. Amazon doesn't offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I'm stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the mid-90s just ran out of gas. Thanks so much (dammit). (BTW, this is why they don't like me at Microsoft, they'd prefer I'd say I'm pissed in a more polite way. That's also part of the problem, the fuckers stopped listening. They have all kinds of fancy excuses for it, but that's the net-net.) 

3. Now, what Google announced is REALLY EXCITING!! I'm not kidding. Everyone is missing the point. It's even better than I hoped it would be. Yes, it's only Python, but you know what MS-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that can be deployed by civillians that scale. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning your own computer. Now Google is taking the black magic out of operating a scalable web app. Python is the new BASIC.