Google App Engine: Giving away your soul

Last week Google launched a new product called Google App Engine. The premise is simple: let Google handle the server setup (including your application stack), maintenance, and scaling. It also means you have to use Google as your data store.

As with all things, there are always bigger fish in the sea. Google is dead-set on being the biggest. It's one thing to use Google products for personal use such as e-mail, documents, and widgets but quite another to store your companies' data in their proprietary data store.

Internet companies generally derive their value in one way: their data. For every user your app (running on Google App Engine) attracts, Google also gains a user. This is why Google chose to have a top-level User type in their data store. At the very least Google should be paying you, because your Application is providing them with more users.

By giving away the one thing that makes your application valuable, you are in essence giving away your soul.