Google will never do small projects, and doesn't see why you should either

Google AppEngine announced a new pricing model and the killer is that as soon as an 'app'* costs anything it costs $9 per month. The implication to me is clearly this: never do anything small. This probably won't be a barrier to people building a business on AppEngine, they're probably planning on moving many more dollars per month than $9. But I think it will be a barrier to tinkering and creativity.

In some sense 'never do anything small' could be good advice, but in another sense it is a path to missed opportunity. I have criticized Google's current corporate culture as being unable to do anything small. If they can't service 10000 users on opening day and a million within 6 months they're not interested (and really I think they'd be much more interested in 10 million). I think this means they'll never do anything truly new that would have to go through a phase of being small and experimental and unfinished and creative. Reddit or Twitter or Craigslist won't start there. And Google won't try to. They might acquire the next thing like that, but they won't start it.

I now see this culture polluting AppEngine. Under this new regime, I would not start a new AppEngine product speculatively just to see if something worked. I would not experiment there. Making a business decision, it is still viable, but it's not a place for creativity. Now, I'd almost certainly rather go with an Amazon Web Services EC2 micro instance or mini instance. I have one. It's great. It will host any number of 'apps' for the flat rate per month I'm already paying. Great. I can run any software I want and play there and try things.

(* What is an 'app'? It's a DNS name. reset.appspot.com or www.comicchopshop.com are a couple examples. Now, I can kinda cheat this and build any amount of functionality under that at /foo and /bar, but there are limits to how far it is a good idea and good design to go with that.)