There's been a lot of coverage of our announcement of Force.com for Google App Engine yesterday. By my last check, Google News showed 42 articles online related to the announcement. See Google's post about it on the App Engine blog as well as the post about it on the Google Code blog. I think this is a testament to the interest level in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) push that's happening in the market today, and both Force.com and Google are at the forefront of it.

The announcement of this new Google/Force.com integration is also a good time to bring up the topic of lock-in, which a few folks have suggested is a draw-back to this PaaS model. The assertion is that if you chose a single platform you are locked-in to a certain language, runtime environment, etc. I often think these kinds of assertions are more motivated by programming religion than practicality. Certainly Force.com and App Engine have some constructs that are specific to their own environment, but last time I checked, so does .NET, Java, etc. You also don't often see Sun and Microsoft teaming up to create integrations between their platforms like Salesforce and Google have done this week. This is not to mention the integration that Force.com already has with Amazon and Facebook. In fact, the nature of PaaS lends itself much better to cross-platform interoperabiilty than on-premise software platforms. As our CEO Marc Benioff recently said "We love everybody" 🙂