The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Googles renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today. Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the cloud of the Internet. Googles entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud  as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku  has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. What makes these offerings so interesting is their promise to turn enormous amounts of operational competency and accumulated economies of scale (which are enormous in Amazons and Googles cases) into a highly competitive new software platform, akin to Windows or Linux, except entirely hosted off-premises and on the Internet.