I’m a little confused: it doesn’t try to compete with Amazon S3 as a remote storage solution, even though that’s the most compelling part of Amazon Web Services; but it doesn’t really compete with Amazon EC2 either, as it doesn’t provide virtual servers but just hosting for Python scripts — and only that. I know it’s fashionable (but not as much as Ruby on Rails for the web 2.0 crowd), I’m sure the infrastructure will be nice and reliable and well designed, and it’s certainly simpler than managing virtual servers in the cloud, but come on, how limiting is that? Yeah, I know there’s a waiting list already, but that doesn’t mean the App Engine will get much real-world usage.

There’s got to be a point where Google’s traditional “let’s start by launching a half-assed ancillary product to see if there’s demand” modus operandi has to fail. Wait, hasn’t it failed with Google Talk already? And with Gmail even (not that the product itself was half-assed, in that case, but they didn’t try to push it hard enough). And lots of other stuff.