Google Loves Small Business

Last week, Google released something they call “Google App Engine”. To your average person this doesn’t really mean much, and the news didn’t make any big headlines. To companies like mine that offer web programming, though, this news is huge.

What is a Web Application?
A web application works like a piece of software you install on your computer, except it’s totally run on the internet. For example, QuickBooks Online Edition is a web program. Rather than buying a CD and storing the Quickbooks information on your computer, you do the whole thing from the Quickbooks online website using a secure login. All the information is stored on the Quickbooks servers. The way things are headed, just about every piece of software will eventually be available as a web application.

What is an App Engine?
An app engine, as Google calls it, is what runs your web application. Once you develop a web program, you need a computer that is connected to the internet full time and is powerful enough to run your program without any problems. The app engine is where all the information from your program, the databases, are stored. In the Quickbooks example, the engine would run the program and store each customers financial information. You can imagine how powerful the computer and the internet connection would have to be to keep a program like that up and running 24/7.

Why do I care?
Google has made this App Engine free to anyone who wants to develop a program capable of 5 million page views or less per month. All I have to do is develop the program itself and “hand it over” to google. They take care of serving it on a computer, and building and maintaing the databases. For small companies that develop programs for other small customers, this dramatically reduces costs. It makes developing a web application cost effective for small business, and everyone wins.

Google loves small business, and we love them back!

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