Google Jumped the Shark? No.

Profy.com today posited the notion that Google has jumped the shark in the post "Is Google App Engine a Sign that Google's Jumped the Shark?"

I'd like to respond here to that notion. You see, proposing that a group has jumped the shark is a truly sinister accusation. Essentially, it alludes to the idea that the group (company, tv show, organization) has strayed from its roots and is moving into territory wildly in an effort to keep an audience and survive. Jumping the Shark is bad. But the question is, has Google jumped the shark?

Let's take a look at what Profy is putting forward as evidence, shall we?

1. Google chose Python for the launch of Google App Engine which, Profy suggests, indicates Google has lost touch with the Web 2.0 space because Ruby on Rails is the "It" framework.
2. Google's innovation ("copy another company's idea, make it bigger if we can, and give it away") won't survive in the face of already slowing ad revenue dollars.

Let's tackle (1) first. Sure, maybe Python isn't the darling of the Web 2.0 world, but perhaps that's because it doesn't have the backing that Ruby has enjoyed from major hosting providers and Web 2.0 fan-boys. I don't currently program in Ruby OR Python, so I can't evaluate this. However, Google has consistently followed the RAD format of development. The fact that they've thrown their hat into the ring for application hosting is ... for sure ... something of note. But, Amazon (and company) are in a different boat than GAE. GAE does more. Amazon's Web Services are just distributed hosting (no different than Media Temple's services). But, like all of Google's services, it is starting as a "it's nice... but" tool. There's always a gotcha with their services... when they start. In the end, however, Google's services usually end up shining relatively brightly.

Now, let's take a look at (2). Yes, Google seems to have fallen into the "copy another company's idea, make it bigger if we can, and give it away" model. However, I don't think that they've jumped the shark on this one. They've stayed true to their original ideal of freeing the world's information. What better way to index the world's information than to have direct access to the applications that operate on the data? What better way to encourage the growth of hosted data applications than to foster their development with free services and tools to jump-start development?

A characteristic element of "jumping the shark" is the clear deviation from an original concept. Fonzie in a bathing suit jumping over a shark was not what Happy Days was about. Happy Days was not an action show. Google is an information company. They need the world's information. Why have massive farms for crawling pages when you can simply index local information instead? If you want information, make it easier for the information to get to you - host it.