[spankalee]

I don't think they are blaming the customers, and if you read posts from back then, I think they take a similar tone: they didn't get the pricing model right, and in order to make App Engine a real sustainable product with an SLA, they needed to update the pricing.

https://plus.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG9...

As for the unique API, of course some of it's unique, because there weren't any standard APIs for the unique parts. Datastore is based on Google's internal NoSQL store. There's are/were standard APIs for NoSQL. Same with Task Queues.

The "proprietary API" bit is overblown though, IMO. The Python version shipped with a somewhat tweaked, Django support, and has grown to support WSGI and standard Django. The Java version uses Servlets with some constraints. Memcache is pretty standard. You can pretty easily abstract away the proprietary bits to run on a standard stack, or use an open source implementation of the APIs.