In my opinion, this pricing change has ability to destroy AppEngine. In my last 10 years of experience in enterprise IT, one thing that has remained constant is how product is priced. Oracle, Msft, IBM, Informatica, Cognos, BusinessObjects.... everyone prices server side products by number of CPUs/Cores. I have personally built servers for same product that used to be 32-bit 4 Core 4GB memory, and now building 64-bit with 12-24 Cores, and terabyte of memory. Given the fact that most products are memory hogs, what i have not seen is product vendors suddenly jump the ship to start charging for memory since that is what is being consumed more. Do product companies see the dollars in that kind of switch? Definitely! So, why dont they do it? 'Cause they understand the time and effort their customers have put in to understanding the current offering, and resulting alignment of corporate app development strategy, resources, hiring, and maintenance dollars.
And out here we have Google, where in 3 years of going live with the product, we are seeing paradigm shift in pricing. And this shift has come as a total disregard for the application developers time, effort and contribution to the platform. Existing developers with really large applications are being forced(without alternative option) down a path that is unknown, while existing issues have not been resolved and features asked for years back not delivered. Personally i dont even have time and energy to understand all the new jargon that has been thrown out there. And all the while we are not even talking about increase in pricing can be as high has 4-8 times for some applications. For comparison sake, if someone were to tell Google that from today all their expenses are going to be 4 times of yesterday, we would surely see dip of a lifetime on ticker symbol GOOG. I as a developer am willing and able to pay at most 1.2 times of what i am paying right now, and definitely not 2x and above. I know i am going to be disappointed. Also, from my personal experience in application development, no set of individuals can be sure how the change is going to play out at the level AppEngine team is going to make. AppEngine team is just assuming that as AppEngine scales to the next level, the current set of changes will be good enough and dont require another paradigm shift. Its like a developer assuming his next API will result in $10million worth of customers. All in all, only thing a developer cares is his app runs on the specified API without errors. No one is looking for any more dials and whistles for 4X money factor. Note: One exception to CPU/memory pricing that has come up recently is Microsoft Server 2008 product where you get 64-GB memory or unlimited memory on the box as per license. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
