Last week I wrote about whether Google’s potential acquisitions might be stifled by its focus on its own infrastructure software projects but noted that by releasing App Engine the company was encouraging a wider ecosystem of applications based on its platform.

What I didn’t discuss at the time was the potential risk of application vendors finding themselves locked-in to the App Engine platform. Of course Amazon also has this issue, the potential impact of which was …

“Funny how Amazon doesn't use S3 to store any assets for amazon.com”tweet by @gruber

Amazon's S3 suffered a major outage today knocking many websites offline. S3 outage started at approximately 12:00 PM EST and the last time I checked at 11:11PM EST, Smugmug, a popular photo hosting site that extensively uses S3, was still down.

- S3 down for more than 7 hours
- S3 outage, 7 hours and counting
- S3 down again
- Amazon failure downs …

We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular.

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification …