We all know Google is  full of talented engineers and great hackers, but it is not always the case about company strategy and marketing stuff. From a developer’s point of view, Google is very problematic about its cloud computing services strategy. Maybe I’m not an expert in this area but something is really obvious.

Google was one of the kick-starters of this cloud computing business. Google was doing everything today’s cloud sync services like Apple’s iCloud does in 2006 or so with Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa etc. Those services are SaaS part of the cloud and it is for all users. Not so impressive. Then in 2006, Google came up with the idea of Google Apps, serving mails, calendars, chats on the cloud for companies, institutions and schools. It means almost nothing for a developer. 70% of companies with 500+ computers use Microsoft Exchange Server, so Google Apps share shouldn’t be that much, right?

Then Google developed bunch of developer tools, this time aimed developers, but again those services were not promising at all. I can count BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Prediction API and most important of all Google App Engine.

Let’s start with App Engine, it was a great free PaaS (platform as a service) hosting service for Java and Python developers. I was hosting a few of my applications there, since last month… In September 1st, they had announced a change in pricing and free quota plans and the result was almost all apps were costing $9-$270/mo. I was really wondering, who is going to pay for that, apparently nobody is. I moved all my App Engine websites to Heroku a very promising PaaS service that hosts Ruby, Java, Python, PHP, started as a small startup and acquired by Salesforce for $212M last year. What a lovely story.

Let’s continue with Cloud Storage and Prediction API. Those projects are graduated from Google Code Labs. That means they are now mature and stable products. Have you ever had a friend who used any of those services? I haven’t. On the other hand, have you ever had a friend who used Amazon S3 or Amazon Elastic MapReduce? I have, a lot, that’s a successful story by Amazon Web Services team.

A few days ago Google has announced Cloud SQL which is a cloud-hosted relational database (actually a MySQL wrapper). Now, how come someone trust that while Amazon RDS (a proven MySQL wrapper with lots of features) and SQL Azure (a MsSQL wrapper) exists out there. Why would someone rely on Google Cloud SQL? Is it because Google is going to change its pricing plan someday and you’ll do a lot of work to choose some other provider? Hell no.

Aren’t IaaS-PaaS-SaaS all supposed to empower business and startups? I don’t see an empowerment right here. I don’t see a mature cloud hosting service from Google. You know what, App Engine is bragging with its ease of development and deployment with Java and Python; trust me Heroku is much easier and neat. I have used Windows Azure for 3 months and still using Amazon EC2 and Heroku and I can definitely say that Google is not **developer-friendly **in cloud business, at all.

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