

Are cloud services the new subprime mortgage? - huyng
http://www.huyng.com/?p=80

======
pg
No; more like the new microcomputer.

------
dtap
Every start-up that relies on someone else (eg. Twitter) for part of their
core competency is subject to the whims of that company. The risk of that
happening is something that every developer must consider. Places like the App
Store are relatively safe, one would think. Google closing down services
certainly brings up questions as far as developing an API utilizing less
popular services.

This reduction also creates opportunities. For example, Evernote made it easy
to import Google Notebook data, thus gaining off of Google axing Notebook.

~~~
thwarted
Google, and developers who make use of their APIs, are in a real catch-22
there. The service can't become popular unless developers make use of it and
help grow it, but you don't want to spend time developing against an API that
isn't already large enough that it's not going to go away.

I always thought/hoped that Google had a large enough and mature enough
infrastructure (including people, process, tech) that it could support a lot
of essentially one-off services (at least as far as income generating goes)
because the core services are so big. And that this infrastructure would give
these smaller things time to incubate and gain significant traction. There's
something to be said for a small service that's been running and been
available forever, that its existence is stable and the choice is secure.
Things don't seem to be getting a chance to properly incubate though.

