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Google's new App Engine was the big story yesterday. Developers can now build web services and run them on Google's computers. Amazon's combinded offerings of S3, EC2, and SimpleDB is probably the closest competitor. But here is an intriguing theory about their plans which even goes beyond what Amazon is doing:
App Engine comes with its own development setup that runs off your computer (available for Windows, OSX, and Linux). You develop the application on your computer, run it, test it, add features, and then upload it to Google's computers. My question is this: What's stopping Google from turning the local development code into a full desktop-based runtime for web applications?In this version of things Google is taking on not just Amazon, but Adobe AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.