I thought I would give a brief overview of other reactions to Google's announcement today of its App Engine cloud computing offering, first mentioned here.

As expected, most of the discussion seems to be focused on the threat to Amazon's EC2 service and what Microsoft will do in response. Larry Dignan is still excited about the "App Appliance" option he cooked up a couple weeks ago and anxiously adapts it to this new development. Aaron Brazell thinks it's no big deal.

Arrington has some more details on scope and intent of the service. Much is being made of the fact that App Engine is restricted to Python as a programming language and currently interfaces only with Google's storage system (according to some people, this makes it not a cloud.). There is some recognition that this probably means Amazon and Google are going after different market segments and I think that's probably the case. On the other hand, I think too much is being made of the fact that Python is not everyone's favorite flavor. I think Microsoft has long since proven that you can ram languages and protocols down people's throats whether they like them or not by favoring them for a platform (although, we'll see how Silverlight does against Flash).

So far, I haven't heard anyone talking much about the leverage implied or the fact that, hello! it's FREE! I think everyone is simply assuming that Google will begin charging market rates and the service will just be another entry into the increasingly crowded cloud provider marketplace. But as I said before, that completely ignores the pricing advantage that Google can bring to bear with the efficiency of their existing backend systems. Moreover, in a week where Amazon's EC2 failed dramatically yet again, I don't think you can say too much about the fact that Google just isn't ever down. Whatever they have done to absorb the intermittent failures inherent in computing environments, if this service makes it publically available, at far lower cost than more fallible services, that's a big deal.