Is Google Sites a threat for websites' developers?

What do you think?
I tried Goggle Sites today,

1) do you know how long it has been out for?

2) do you think is major threat for thousands of businesses that devlop websites (and they don't even make great money on it)?

BTW what's the catch for Google? It's the 1st time they start to remind me MS approach to amrket, eat it all and even getting onto businesses they do not exactly need to be into.

BTW2: here is an article I found talking baout it, but I would like to hear your thoughts: http://www.smartcompany.com.au/information-technology/20100303-google-launches-new-website-development-products-for-smes-small-developers-under-threat.html

Not at all... WYSIWYG applications for building websites have been around for over a decade (Frontpage was released in 1997). It will take a long long time before such editors can even match what experienced web developers do.

I would say it is comparable to saying that Google Translate is a threat to professional translators.

Google sites has been out for along time and there are thousands of hosting companies around. The market is big for everyone.

It depends how as a web development company you position yourself in the market. If you were a Michelin star restaurant and McDonald's opened up down the road you would not be too concerned.

If you were a burger takeaway that sold burgers equivalent to McDonald's burgers but twice the price you probably would be worried.

I think Templates, Joomla, and Wordpress are much greater threats than Google Sites is.

To be honest, some of the templates out there are fantastic and make quick work of building a really nice site. And the average person visiting it will never know the difference. And I say that running a part-time web design shop.

Google Sites is a drop in the website hosting sea. Virb has a much better website hosting service compared to Google Sites, it's not free but it is quite good. These types of sites aren't knew and are very limited in terms of what can be done.

The day web developers are in trouble is the day someone works out how to write a program that can translate a design into a functional website without human intervention and that will most likely never happen.

As the article mentions, only simple sites may be replaced, and any customization will still need to be done by a developer, but, it could be a good way for a company to figure out what they may really want, by putting up a simple site, seeing how it works, and then they can better describe to a developer/firm what they want, since they have had time to see it in action and think about it.

It may become necessary for entry level developers to work with someone more established, as you may not be able to just read an intro book on HTML and CSS and be able to do more than a good automated system.

The same principal applies to blogs.

WordPress and BlogPost have predefined templates and help businesses creates blogs in a day.
But the functionality is minimal. If you need advanced features for your web site you need to have a developer do it.

These "cookie-cutter" technologies can't take you too far.

I see it working for prototyping a web site not replacing the job of a professional web developer.

I think Google Sites should be a threat to these folks; but somehow it is not.

Studying the reason why it is so will give us very interesting insights about how small/medium businesses segment should be cracked.

The catch for Google? More customers for their adsense program. The main reason that I can think of for why Google is not worth 1000 times more than it already is, even if the world is chock full of businesses that can afford to run Google adsense campaigns in their locality but don't is because they don't have a website!

And these mom-and-pop setups think it's way too expensive to build their own. They may not even know about Drupal, Joomla et al, that almost negate the requirement of anything but some cheap hosting and a domain.

So, if I were Google, I would do the same thing. It doesn't hurt me to offer hosting to a probably extremely low-use website, make them buy a domain from me for profit, and then promote my adsense program to them : "now that you've got a website, why not think about promoting it online and getting more business..."

I don't think this is a threat. If anything, Google is giving a taste of blood for all these small people out there. After a while of success, they're gonna get hungry for a bigger, more powerful, sexier site. That's not something any WYSIWYG editor or CMS can deliver out-of-the-box. And that's where people like you and me come in ;)