Just a quick link; Michael Krigsman of the IT Project Failures blog has a post up now with some analysis of Google's AppEngine failure that occured last week.

Krigsman believes that the failure is more substantive than some other analysts seem to think (see my previous post on the failure citing at least one example), from the perspective of discouraging development using the service, and notes that Google's wholly inadequate customer service system is thrown into relief by the problem and will exacerbate future adoption. This is much the same issue which caused Amazon so much grief during their initial problems with cloud services... not the failure itself, but the lack of communication and support. Google has never, for any product, offered particularly professional support services, but if they want to expand this offering they are going to have to figure out how to do so.