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A comment on Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone. Parent comment

Re:Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone by alanctgardner2 on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @09:14PM (#6518924)
Comparing this to Google Reader is ridiculous. Google Reader was free, and it had a small potential market. Even if Google Reader had 100% of the market (which I'm sure people will say it did), the number of potential users was not huge, and the amount of revenue they could bring in was pretty small.

Even if App Engine isn't tremendously valuable now, it's a growth market, and easily monetizable. Google isn't going to burn a bunch of customers who could be - if they end up being the next Netflix - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue.

I wish people would stop with the hyperbolic Google Reader stuff. Google's bread and butter are web ads, and they're a shrinking market. As Facebook can attest, mobile is hard to monetize, and it makes a lot of sense to focus on areas where people can just pay you directly. AWS has already validated this market, Google has the capacity to deliver, they've just fumbled the execution wildly.

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Re:Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone by evan_ on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @11:31PM (#6519253)
I bring it up because Reader was a product that nobody expected to ever go away, until it did.
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Re:Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone by orf on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @05:38AM (#6520261)
If you didn't expect a product that had wallowed in practical obscurity for several years with no updates (and no team working on it) to go away then you are a bit silly.
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Re:Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone by yeukhon on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @10:21PM (#6519092)
Totally agree on this. Reader was a free software. They may not be making billions out of App Engine but a lot of fortunate 500 are moving to this kind of platform and Google has probably invested tens of billions and thousands of engineers into GAE. No way they will kill this in the next 10 years unless market crashed.

That kind of cynical thought should be eliminated.

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Re:Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone by coldtea on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @04:47AM (#6520097)
>They may not be making billions out of App Engine but a lot of fortunate 500 are moving to this kind of platform

Not that many.

>and Google has probably invested tens of billions and thousands of engineers into GAE

If we're speculating, I'd say, far far less.

Except for the parts they use themselves too, anyway.

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