There is (again) a rumor out there that Google will soon offer a third party service platform: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/03/29/pigs.html.  I mostly ignore the rumors but this is one I find hard to ignore. Why?  Mostly because it makes too much sense.  The Google infrastructure investment combined with phenomenal scale yields some of the lowest cost compute and storage in the industry.  They can sell compute and storage at considerably above their costs and yet still be offering substantial cost reductions to smaller services.  That’s if they chose to charge for it.  Google also has the highest scale advertising platform in the world offering opportunity to monetize even that for which they don’t directly charge.  When something looks like it makes sense economically and fits in strategically, it just about has to happen.

We all know that these rumors often have nothing at all behind them.  Some are simply excited fabrications. But, even knowing that, on this one it’s a matter of when rather than if.

Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for pointing me to the blog posting above.

                                    --jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
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