Or google charts...I'm building a product that uses this pretty heavily right now, but it seems too good to be true. Generating those graphs for me is really nice, but the bandwidth and CPU cycles that I'm using aren't free (for google), what's their upside?
Cool, google, and thanks, but how does this make financial sense for you?
It's not such a huge file either, I can't imagine what benefits people think this has. Is it so the first page loads a fraction of a second faster (maybe)?
This is literally the type of stuff I daydream about... "Here, I've got all this computing infrastructure, isn't it cool? Tell you what, use it for free!"
That's awesome. I guess I was kindof asking if I was missing the point or something. Are there really people at google who are saying "Listen, boss, I'm going to need $money to build google font library. I'm going to need $foo engineers, and $bar resources, but we should do this because it would be fun!"
And their boss goes "huh, cool! Yeah, here is some money!"
?
If the web doesn't speed up, more users will move to closed ecosystems like the iPhone App Store.
Other projects are motivated by this are Google Chrome (and the open source around it) and Google Page Speed, for example.