The Shadow on Walled Gardens

Recently, a lot of electrons have been pressed into service over Google's AppEngine. It was hoped that Google might contribute a more open solution and not be a stickler for whence a given API call is coming. As Billy Marshall notes, however, Google's AppEngine essentially creates a supercomputer with hundreds of developers programming it. It does not represent the utility for developers that it initially seemed to be. He notes, and we must agree, that true cloud computing, as practiced by Amazon, XCalibre, and other companies, will almost certainly outpace a restricted environment such as Google's AppEngine currently seems to be.