Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think that you're off the mark. JMHO Why, thank you! In this case, my writing may be comp

Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think that you're off the mark. JMHO Why, thank you! In this case, my writing may be completely off base, but it has achieved its victory condition: It has drawn you out to provide a very intelligent level of argument. ;) And I am operating at a severe disadvantage... all I know about Google (and about Python and Django, for that matter) is what I read in the papers. You really can't learn much about what's going on inside Google from the papers. That's a big part of the problem here: with Google Apps the company seems to be gearing up to make a transition toward more transparency, but they're not quite there yet. I am fully willing to admit that Google's infrastructure kicks the butt of a $7 web host... once I know what I'm getting, what the charge is, and what the service level will be. I certainly agree that the various limitations we can see now -- Python only, limited static files, limits on peak bandwidth, no SSL for now, blah blah blah -- will all be forgivable, even trivial, once we have confidence that Google will deliver cheap scalability and rock-solid operational performance -- and once there are well-understood approaches and tools for deploying Google Apps without "marrying oneself to the Google toolset". But for much of their history Google's reputation has been kind of like Batman's reputation: They're known to be superheroes, they have many wonderful toys, they use them mostly for good and we're very grateful... but they operate in the shadows, and folks often complain that it's hard to get them on the phone to explain exactly why your pagerank just dropped by fifty spots overnight, or exactly how they control your ad revenue for false clicks. I don't attribute any of that to malice, though. And it's early in the history of the beta of Google Apps (a real beta, not one of those legendary eternal "betas"), so we must be patient. Certainly your words are cause for optimism.