Right

This is my first entry for this blog. It's gonna be about me learning App Engine, since I learn the best by teaching others. But first, a little insight about it, to get be going with the writing. I work at a consulting company, and is currently rented, full time, to a local company that does internal development of it's CRM system. The last few days, I've been trying to deploy a very, very simple web application. It's basically a simple one-page form, tied to a database and a web service. It also does some mailing stuff. Problem is, deploying this app is insanely complicated, even in this organization that has a pretty small IT department. I have to order a bloody server, along with a functional specification. I have to specifically order the SQL server, and the mail server. I also have to request IP access to the web service. And I have to go through two guys which are pretty hard to get a hold of. The whole thing has taken like 3 days. To upload a web app. This is something that would have taken me approximately one hour TOPS on my own server. On app engine? 10 minutes. I wonder what would have happened if I had developed the application in Python and uploaded it onto app engine. I would probably had gotten into trouble, but I imagine this happening in a lot of companies. Google very much considers App Engine to be a part of it's Google Apps suite - you can tie an app engine to your Google Apps for your Domain account, and it's listed right there, next to your Docs, Mail, Calendar and whatnot: This made me realize - Google is REALLY going after the internal IT departments of companies, in a very sneaky way. Lets just say that I was a little insane, and got just one wiki (Sites) and one app engine going in the organization, and got a subdomain of the company tied up to them (theapp.thecompanyiworkfor.com) through some minor but clever politics and bribery by candy. Lets then say that the organization started to rely a bit on these two things. Boom. Suddendly, google is in your organization, and you are not getting rid of it. You might as well start to use docs. Or mail. EVERYONE uses skype in the organization, by the way, even though absolutely no company policy dicates it's use. It's just there, and has grown into the organization. I imagine the same happening with Google Apps. Really, really frickin' sneaky, google.