"Suicidal"? Realistically what would happen, do you think? They shut down Google Reader, which is probably used by 1000+ times as many people. The average user of Google Apps Engine apps probably has no idea where the service is hosted and will never understand why they should blame downtime on Google.
Comparing this to Google Reader is ridiculous. Google Reader was free, and it had a small potential market. Even if Google Reader had 100% of the market (which I'm sure people will say it did), the number of potential users was not huge, and the amount of revenue they could bring in was pretty small.
Even if App Engine isn't tremendously valuable now, it's a growth market, and easily monetizable. Google isn't going to burn a bunch of customers who could be - if they end up being the next Netflix - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue.
I wish people would stop with the hyperbolic Google Reader stuff. Google's bread and butter are web ads, and they're a shrinking market. As Facebook can attest, mobile is hard to monetize, and it makes a lot of sense to focus on areas where people can just pay you directly. AWS has already validated this market, Google has the capacity to deliver, they've just fumbled the execution wildly.
If you didn't expect a product that had wallowed in practical obscurity for several years with no updates (and no team working on it) to go away then you are a bit silly.
Totally agree on this. Reader was a free software. They may not be making billions out of App Engine but a lot of fortunate 500 are moving to this kind of platform and Google has probably invested tens of billions and thousands of engineers into GAE. No way they will kill this in the next 10 years unless market crashed.
That kind of cynical thought should be eliminated.
But reader was not used by 1000+ times as many people, quite the opposite. They namedropped vice which itself has far more daily readers than Google reader had. That's one customer, there are thousands of others that use app engine to serve billions of page views a day.
