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App Engine is Jotspot. No, Seriously.

William Grosso @ June 3, 2008

Way back in 2004, I was running SDForum’s Emerging Technology SIG. I was also looking for a job: we’d sold Hipbone to Kana and my people-search startup idea wasn’t getting much traction with the VC’s1 So I looked around for a job and interviewed at Jotspot.

I was fascinated by the vision. Ultimately, I was more curious about telecommunications than wikis, and so I became Echopass’s VP of Engineering instead of joining Jotspot. But I didn’t forget the vision and so, after joining Echopass, I asked Joe Krauss, the CEO of Jotspot, to speak at the Emerging Technology SIG.

He spoke in November of 2004 and then, in March of 2005 he wrote an excellent blog post summarizing the talk.

The core of that blog post is the following snippet:

The purpose of software in business is to support the way a business does business – from the way a business runs it’s hiring and firing to the way it orders materials to the way it tracks sales. In the market-speak that surrounds the technology business, the purpose of software in business is to support these “business processes”.

Let’s do some simple math. First, every business has multiple processes. Things like hiring, firing, selling, ordering, etc. Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized. Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).

These three facts

  • every business has multiple processes
  • processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
  • there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.

means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.

Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

It’s a brilliant insight. And it’s only a short leap from that to the vision of Jotspot. Which, 4 years later, I remember as:

  • Start with a wiki
  • Add in a declarative programming language
  • Make the barrier to building crude-looking but fully functional applications as low as possible
  • Then host the applications for a low monthly fee, so that the total cost of building and deploying is as small as possible for the company building the applications.
  • There you have it: A platform for addressing the long-tail of software. Usable both inside companies for internal applications and by ISVs looking to address small markets. And Jotspot makes money from the hosting.

Obviously, it didn’t quite work out. Google bought Jotspot and transformed it into Google Sites, while Joe went on to be involved in OpenSocial.

But, now, look at what’s happened.

Recall that, in 2005, Ruby on Rails brought the cost of building a beta version of site down dramatically, but with the caveat that RoR sites typical incur more operational overhead than other web application platforms2. In spite of the fact that RoR is a nice web development environment, the number of small web applications being developed hasn’t exploded3.

Django is even nicer than RoR. At least in part because Python is, as Alex Russell often says4, the closest thing to executable pseduocode out there. But also because it’s a great framework5

Google App Engine lets you build in Python, using Django, and using an SDK on your desktop for rapid iteration. Once the app is working, you can then deploy on Google. And the first 5 million page views per month are free.

Not only that, but

In short, App Engine completes Google’s version of the Jotspot vision and enables developers to effectively address the long-tail of software.

  1. In the world of small consolations: virtually identical ideas did get traction in 2006 and 2007.↩
  2. Note the diplomatic phrasing↩
  3. That’s a guess, of course. But I’d say that if you plotted the data from 2000 to 2008 in terms of number of web apps deployed, you wouldn’t be able to spot RoR↩
  4. And said, once more, at Google IO↩
  5. This is not just random speculation. Engage uses Django for several secondary web applications and I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that Django is just plain sweet.↩

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