Jeffrey McManus

We’ve been paying attention to the launch of Google App Engine over the past day and a half and we will continue to keep an eye on it on behalf of our consulting clients. As is often the case with paradigm-challenging products, people often try to characterize the new thing in terms of what they already know. But we don’t believe that Google App Engine is directly competitive with Amazon EC2 today, although it could be in the future. We also don’t believe, as a few people have asserted, that it’s competitive with social networks like Facebook either. Here’s why.

Amazon EC2 is one of the most open platform products in existence today. When you spin up an instance of an EC2 server, you get to make all the choices regarding operating system and software. You log in as root. You can write applications on an EC2 instance using any language and tools you want. You pay only for what you use.

Google App Engine, on the other hand, is a walled garden. In the words of Tim Bray, if you go the App Engine route, particularly if you choose to use Google authentication, you are essentially a sharecropper, working on Google’s farm. You write the application, but Google owns the infrastructure and, more importantly, they own your users.

Ah, you say, but it’s certainly true that closed platforms can be spectacularly successful, at least some of the time. Look at Facebook, for example, one of the most popular walled gardens in existence today. Facebook exerts a great deal of control over what applications running on its platform can do through frequently-changing terms of service and rules enforced in its technology stack. But the difference here is that Facebook asks you to trade off openness and control of your application in exchange for something valuable — its users’ attention. The deal you make with them goes something like this: give me access to your millions of users, and in exchange I’ll adhere to your terms of service and accept your proprietary application framework — I’ll even go so far as to learn the only programming language that you really support well (which in Facebook’s case is PHP).

Google App Engine is neither fish nor fowl. It requires developers to write to their framework without the commensurate benefit of access to a huge built-in audience of users.

Google is providing access to App Engine for free for now, although traffic and storage is limited and we haven’t seen information about commercial licensing, which is troublesome and probably a deal-killer for all but the most trivial applications. It’s true that in many cases “free” can trump “open” or “complete”, but in the case of Google App Engine we believe that “free” won’t make a huge difference. It may attract experimenters and people writing demonstration applications, but virtual hosting (through EC2 or fixed-price virtual hosting providers such as Slicehost) is so close to free today that the “free” part of Google App Engine should not make a difference to anyone who is looking to write a non-trivial application.

The design choices that Google made with this product are pornographically good news for Python developers, who now have their own dedicated application server and a way to build web applications using their language of choice. This may well put Python on the map (as the second language of choice alongside Java, PHP and C#) as one of the Languages That Matter. But it’s also important to remember that consumers don’t use Python (or any other programming language), they use applications. In this respect, Google App Engine is one of many Google products that seems to have been created with technologists, as opposed to consumers, in mind.

On the consulting side we’ve been getting a ton of inquiries from customers regarding strategies and tactics for virtualization on platforms like Amazon EC2, and we’re in the process of adding a formal software development practice dedicated to supporting Amazon’s EC2 and S3 products. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t support something like Google App Engine if a client asked us to and there was a good reason to, but for the reasons we’ve described here, we’d prefer to take a wait-and-see attitude towards this and carefully weigh the drawbacks and limitations before devoting serious time or development effort to the platform.

All that having been said, we still believe that Amazon has missed an opportunity by positioning EC2 as a developer product as opposed to a hosting product. If the Google App Engine product were to make a dent in EC2’s momentum, we’d recommend that Amazon provide better support for multi-server scalability scenarios. Amazon recently started moving in this direction with the release of new features intended to give administrators the ability to assign IP addresses and machine instances to specific data centers, but providing explicit support for an adaptive clustering package like Scalr would give EC2 a vital edge, particularly for professional applications.

Link: Announcing the OpenSocial Foundation

Banding together to make a half-dozen social networks interoperable is not the same as having critical mass. It is the equivalent of having fifteen women band together to give birth to a child.

Also, creating a nonprofit foundation to manage your endeavor does not automatically make you equivalent to Firefox.

Cheers. I’m always here if you need anything.

Jeffrey

Link: Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com.

"No problem, we thought, Google is nice enough to provide a programming interface to support this. In fact, they have multiple such APIs (application programming interfaces). As it turns out, neither of the versions of these interfaces that Google provides works completely. One version doesn’t let you migrate comments (an important part of many blogs). The other doesn’t let you move more than a few dozen articles - period. Basically, Google has seemingly made it intentionally difficult to migrate off of their platform. This is just annoying. We ended up writing a fair amount of custom code and jumping through a few hoops to get all of the data migrated over (which we finally did). But, this was much harder than it should have been, and we’re trained professionals (so please, don’t try this at home). If you’re not a programmer, chances are you won’t be able to do this yourself. It shouldn’t be that hard."

I know that Wordpress does a good job of letting you liberate your data and move it around; I’m thinking about moving the four or five blogs that I maintain onto a single server — the fact that all of them are either in Wordpress already or are importable by Wordpress is going to be helpful.

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook

"On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster and Ning, according to people briefed on the plans. Those people asked not to be named because they agreed to keep the alliance’s plans confidential."

We’ll see what this looks like when it emerges, but whaddya wanna bet that the "standard" they come up with walks and talks like Facebook’s API yet is every so slightly different (and incompatible) with Facebook’s API?

And how is LinkedIn supposed to factor in here, I wonder, with their famous opposition to the notion of an open platform?

I’m still willing to accept that this initiative is getting lost in the NY Times’ muddled inability to do a decent and technically accurate story on Silicon Valley technology, but it really sounds Google is trying hard to turn "openness" and "interoperability" into the new "embrace, extend, extinguish" here. Which, if successful, would be quite a feat.

Update: A second-day story on this quoted Joe Krause on behalf of Google. From this one could deduce that Google’s entry into the "open but not Facebook" cabal will be the relaunched JotSpot, whenever they get around to re-launching it.

Update: Marc Andressen has more about this on his blog. I wish he’d posted this yesterday instead of letting everybody get half of the story via TechCrunch. Marc’s post clears things up a bit but I’m still interested in seeing what the bits look like. It seems like this is more an attack on Facebook’s proprietary markup language than anything else. Memo to interoperable social network cabal: there is no such thing as a platform that does not use some kind of proprietary semantics to map out its feature set. You’ll find yourself doing this as well if you haven’t done it already.

Side note to web marketers, PR mavens and evangelists: if you want to ensure that there is an elevated level of confusion associated with your launch, one sure way to accomplish that is to provide an exclusive leak to TechCrunch prior to your public launch. I know it’s virtually impossible to get on TechCrunch unless you give them a scoop, but there’s a cost associated with making those guys your media leak of choice. To put it another way, no product launch has ever failed because the product didn’t brief TechCrunch about it a few days ahead of time.

Update: Michael Arrington’s headline on this today says "checkmate!" which is of course nonsense since the game isn’t even half over, OpenSocial hasn’t even produced anything yet and Facebook could of course join at any time if they wanted. His commenters mostly seem to agree.

Saul Hansell of the NY Times has some less hysterical thoughts on this; he points out that "LinkedIn has also said it may ask for a revenue share from those who
create applications for its network. And haggling over money, no doubt,
will slow down the deployment of many social applications." No kidding. This is my main concern about the path that LinkedIn is going down. Having to ask permission to build an app and then provide a revenue share isn’t a platform; it’s the definition of a walled garden. AOL was successful at this for a while in the 1990s because they were able to bring a mass audience when nobody else could, but these days, that dog won’t hunt, monsieur.

It looks like Google had a contingency plan for municipal wi-fi in San Francisco in the event that Earthlink cratered. Last night I got an email from my ISP, Sonic.net, that said they’re going to try build an open wireless grid in partnership with Google using existing customers’ internet connections.

I sent this over to Om Malik who wrote it up on his blog last night.

It’ll be interesting to see if this plan to build the muni wi-fi network in San Francisco on an ad-hoc basis gets anywhere. There’s not much in it for the typical ISP customer, who would  supply the electricity and a small chunk of bandwidth in exchange for a vague promise to share an unspecified bit of any Google advertising revenue that may be generated at some point in the future.

The real trick here for me would be figuring out who’s ultimately responsible for the network. I ran an open wireless network for my neighbors to use for a year, but I had to button it up after one of my bonehead neighbors started using it to download copyrighted movies, triggering several nastygrams which I did not appreciate.

Link: eBay pulls U.S. ads from Google AdWords network

"eBay has pulled its advertising from Google’s AdWords network in the United States, an eBay spokesman said on Wednesday. Technology trade publication Computerworld, which originally reported the move, cited a source as saying it was in response to Google’s decision to hold a party starting at the same time as an eBay conference for merchants who sell on its site."

I’m surprised this didn’t get more attention today, since eBay’s annual Google spend is what the money men like to refer to as "materially significant". I wonder why Google is willing to sacrifice one of its biggest customers to promote an also-ran payment system that is squarely outside of its core competency?

Update: I saw more belated stories and posts on this in the past 24 hours, including a good one from former eBayer Shri Mahesh defending eBay and suggesting that eBay "won", which I’m not sure about. This particular battle isn’t over and the overall war is just starting.

There’s some more good comments from Paul Kedrosky suggesting that eBay is hurting themselves by boycotting AdWords. eBay may indeed be hurting itself in a business sense, but there are also reputational effects to consider when this kind of thing happens, and I don’t think that Google or eBay come off well in all this. Anyway, I don’t expect that eBay will stop using Google forever (the fact that they have very little leverage over Google undoubtedly drives them crazy). At the same time, there is a certain unfortunate petulance at the soul of eBay and if anything about this episode is harmful to that company, it’s the fact that its petulant nature is being exposed. Arbitrarily zapping partners like this, even big scary ones, is not a terrific way to run a platform.

A couple other points in the eBay/Google battle that nobody seems to have brought up: 1) eBay banned Google Checkout a while back on the flimsiest of pretenses, so creating the opportunity to take its case directly to eBay’s sellers would seem like a reasonable thing for Google to do; 2) there is ample precedent for this — those of us whose attention spans are longer than two weeks recall that elbowing in to the eBay Live conference was one of the tactics that PayPal used five years ago when it was penetrating the eBay marketplace. The outcome of that tactic was well-known (eBay was compelled to write PayPal a nine-figure check after its home-grown payment processing business failed to catch on). I doubt this is the outcome that Google is going for here, so it begs the question — why is Google even in the payment-processing business and how could their strategy be so tone-deaf to the reactions of the incumbent in this space?

My pal Jeff Barr of Amazon posted on his personal blog about how he was interviewed by Google and continues to get pinged by their recruiters after he already gave them a polite "no thanks". He asks whether their recruiters shouldn’t maybe have way of looking up candidates in some sort of database — you know, maybe like a search engine?

I don’t think I’ve blogged about this yet, but I interviewed at Google from late 2005 through early 2006. The experience was pretty strange. Google kept me on the hook for five full months, having me in repeatedly for meetings with people who had no idea why they were talking to me or what to ask me, putting me in front of middle managers who would theoretically be my superiors but who had far less experience than me, handing me off from one recruiter to another, and never getting back to me when they promised to.

In one of the interviews, a very young Google product manager spent a good hour and a half pumping me for information on developer relations and platform evangelism. The questions he asked suggested to me that he wasn’t interested in hiring me at all; it seemed like he was getting me to verbally convey to him the essence of what developer relations people do so they could go off and re-invent the discipline themselves. Maybe the plan was to reduce it to a few hundred lines of Python, I’m not sure.

So anyway, after months of interviews, epic games of phone tag and myriad unexplained delays, the recruiter du jour promised me that a job offer was imminent. I called her to say "don’t bother". I wound up going to work for Yahoo! because I was inspired by what they wanted to do and they gave me everything I wanted without making me feel like a recent parolee. The amount of time that elapsed between my interview and my first day of work at Yahoo! was approximately a week and a half.

There are a lot of things that Yahoo! that still needs to get ironed out. Retaining talented hires is a big one, as it is for any company (coincidentally, my wife’s last day at Yahoo! is next week). But swooping in and snagging me as quickly as they did was one of the things that Yahoo! definitely did right.

And they announced it on Flickr, which is ironic, kinda, since it looked like Dodgeball was going to be Google’s Flickr — a semi-trendoid, fairly simple community application with viral uptake…and more question marks than zeroes on the balance sheet.

What went wrong? No follow-through and no support from Google, which seems to be off chasing other shiny objects instead of tending to the products and talent in which it invested. This may be another data point that demonstrates that tactical is the new strategic.

Because I am craven, I whipped out a spreadsheet to figure out how much money the two founders might have walked away from. It’s impossible to know the dollar amount without knowing how much Google paid for it and whether they had investors, etc., but since they were less than 2 years into what was probably a 3-4 year earn-out it seems like the number must have been non-trivial, yet not psychotically large, again all depending on what the purchase price was and whether they had any investors. But my point, and I do have one, is: good for those guys for following their passions and not buying into the myth of the golden handcuffs.

I should mention that I am/was a enthusiastic user of Dodgeball and I still ping my contacts every so often (mainly to let me wife et al. know where I am). It would be a pity if Dodgeball underwent an unfortunate transmogrification now that two of the founders are out the door.

About a month ago I was having a talk with someone who was interested in Approver.com. They’d tried the site and liked it, but they couldn’t believe that I’d have the audacity to compete against Google.

To be honest, competing against anybody didn’t enter my mind when I built Approver, since I built it to solve a somewhat narrow document-sharing problem that had bugged me over the years and at the time there was really nothing like it. At any rate, what Approver does is sufficiently different that what anybody else does shouldn’t cause us to lose much sleep. An internet business is way more than a bunch of web pages and a database. Yes, we have an in-browser word processor too, but in some respects, we come to praise Microsoft Office, not to bury it.

But this person I was talking to wanted to know how a small team could possibly build a business that could possibly withstand the Google juggernaut.

Set aside the fact that, for whatever reason, Google doesn’t execute in a particularly overwhelming fashion across more than a few of the product areas it competes in, not for lack of trying. I’ve blogged about this before, although you don’t have to take my word for it: statistics say it more compellingly than my Google-dissing potty mouth ever could. Google is no 800-pound gorilla, they’re not Microsoft circa 1995, and internet businesses can certainly compete on a lot of different levels with Google in the room.

How could this possibly be? For me, one answer is symbolized by this:

"Noreply" emails are okay in certain situations. But sending out an email message pertaining to a revenue-generating activity, then telling the potential customer that you don’t actually want to hear from them, is completely ass-backwards.

A lot of big companies fall into this trap. Remember when a lot of big banks shut down their branches in the 1990s because they’d decided that coming into contact with customers cost too much money? The joke was that the ultimate design for a future bank branch would have a moat and barbed wire around it. Google’s passion for automating everything and minimizing contact with real people is the internet version of the bank branch with the barbed-wire moat. I’ve seen eBay run into problems with this from time to time, but Google seems to be raising it to an art form.

I’m religious about looking at all the feedback email and support requests for Approver.com myself. I’m going to keep doing it until they come and haul me away. I’ve gotten a few startled emails from users who couldn’t believe
that I give out my personal email to everybody who registers for the
site. I figure, if I require you to give me your email address to sign
up for my site, it’s only fair that you should have mine, too. Is that
totally insane of me? I suppose time will tell.

If I don’t have time to look at the mail that users send me, I really shouldn’t be in business. The common response to this (usually offered by internet dudes who have never run their own businesses before) is "oh, that will never scale." But one need look no further than Craig Newmark to see an example of a nonlinearly successful internet business person who somehow finds time to do this well, and to do it himself (although I’m sure that with millions of users, Craig has at least a little help these days).

I should mention that I was originally trying to reply to Google to let them know that the link they referred to in their email — the one that would hypothetically lead me to pay them money — was broken. Oh, well, I’m they’ll find out about it eventually from somebody, or maybe they’ll write a Python script to take care of it or something.

Link: Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google

The on-line collaboration responsible for Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of Google and Yahoo, the founder of the popular Internet encyclopedia said on Thursday.
Wikia Inc., the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, is aiming to take as much as 5 percent of the lucrative Internet search market, Jimmy Wales said at a news conference in Tokyo. "The idea that Google has some edge because they’ve got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said.

Interesting that people are making Google into some sort of omnipotent 800-pound gorilla, almost as if they want it to take on the role that Microsoft had in the 1990s. But with hindsight, we know that the myth of the omnipotent Microsoft was just that, a myth, and it’s definitely the case with Google today. No company can do all things well, and there will always be opportunities for disruptive upstarts — we shouldn’t let the existence of a big, successful company suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Link: An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little

"Because traditional networks are blind, I’ve always assumed that many of the places where your ads come up are on B- and C-level sites," Mr. Klein said. "With Quigo, you know it’s on ESPN.com, not Joe Schmo’s sports blog. It’s a premium site, and you’re willing to spend more money."

Maybe I’m missing something here, but this seems a little thick-headed. Internet marketing is about clicks, not how good your ad looks on an "A-list" site. (Unless your goal is to impress people with the size of your ad spend as opposed to driving quantifiable results for your business.) So if Joe Schmoe drives more clicks to your site than ESPN, doesn’t that make Joe’s blog an A-list property by definition?

Speaking of getting all my information through my mobile phone, I have started to use Google Calendar in a big way. However, Google Calendar explodes spectacularly on my phone, which may cause me to dump it if I can find something better. Is anybody using a web-based calendar that works with Windows Mobile that they like? (I should point out that I don’t want replication here; I’m done with replication, permanently. I want a web calendar that also happens to work with Windows Mobile’s web browser.)

Update: I have started using 30boxes and it is tremendous. Only thing it’s lacking is the ability to import my Google Calendar data, but I’ll do that manually over the course of the next few weeks.

I’m doing some marketing for Approver this week, including the press release I mentioned earlier but also some other stuff. I’ve been familiar with the Google AdWords product but I’m using it seriously for the first time to promote the site this week.

The user interface to the AdWords site leaves something to be desired. It’s slow. It’s not well organized. Some of the most important information (like whether a keyword you’ve bid on is actually displaying in search results) is buried in the user interface. And useful tools created to help you correct ineffective bids are accessed off to the side instead of integrated with the rest of the site.

AdWords is a complex product, but it’s clear that the interface wasn’t designed organically as much as it was bolted together over time. I understand how this could have happened, and I really empathize with the folks who are responsible for keeping this multi-billion dollar train running on time.

At one point, as I so often do, I threw up my hands and said "I need to hack together something that this user interface isn’t letting me do."

So I looked into using the AdWords API, but hit the brakes when I noticed that they charge for access to it. Even worse, it’s far from clear just what the charges are. (Confidential to AdWords team: what is a "quota unit"? If you’re going to set up a crazy system, define your own lexicon for it, and expect people to pay money for it, the least you could do is link to definitions and documentation.)

Setting that aside, charging for an API like this is lame. It’s like selling tickets to get in to a grocery store. You might be able to get away with it if you run the only grocery store within 500 miles, but it’s not going to win you any friends. And at the end of the day it’s self-defeating for Google — the whole point of AdWords is to capture value in exchange for business results, not tax users for creating applications that help accelerate Google’s business.

When I was at eBay we charged for the API for a few years. Defending that to developers was one of the most difficult parts of my job. The only honest defense I could offer was that charging for the API imposes a tax on usage which ensures that developers use the API efficiently. The unspoken flip side of that is "if we made it free, our servers would get the crap pounded out of them."

I suspect that imposing a tax as a blunt-force method of imposing operational efficiency in the absence of 100% stability and uptime is what’s going on with the AdWords product. But even when eBay was charging for access to the API, we still provided a way for little guys to get access for free, at least on a limited basis. AdWords doesn’t seem to do that today, which is a pity.

(eBay did make its API completely free shortly after I left, and the sky did not fall, as far as I know.)

I suspect that we haven’t heard much about the AdWords API tax since it started back in November because APIs are a sort of esoteric and mysterious thing to the folks who cover Google. There could be another reason, though: the big SEO guys (who are likely the heaviest users of the AdWords API) aren’t going to complain about this much because it has the effect of suppressing or eliminating potential competitors. Which isn’t good for Google’s business either.