Google has launched a preview of their new Google App Engine. The first supported language is Python, which can be used to develop web applications that Google will host for you.

Google's plan is to handle all the mundane things that you need to do when getting an application running on the web... things like hardware setup, DB and web software configuration, notifications, authentication, log rolling, scaling and the like.

I wonder if offerings like this from Google (and other vendors like Amazon) could spawn a new breed of startups where entrepreneurs can concentrate on their ideas without worrying about hardware purchases and Apache config files?