TechCrunch is speculating that Google may begin the first major phase of becoming an infrastructure provider for developers by exposing its Bigtable data storage system as a Web service. This service would be similar to Amazon's SimpleDB service, which automatically indexes data and provides an API for storage and access.
I've queried Google on this potential news and await a response. Given Google's prowess at delivering applications from the cloud, it's logical to expect the company to become a platform for application services, with APIs for storage, compute cycles and databases--similar to what Amazon has done with its S3 storage and Elastic Compute Cloud along with SimpleDB.
