I think the basic idea is that if Google helps high growth companies launch, using entirely their infrastructure, that will pay dividends down the road, in many areas across the company. Startups built and scaled on Google products will stay loyal and have vendor lock in.

Also the emphasis on UX assistance and Play store priority sounds like they really want to improve the Android ecosystem.

I think you nailed it. They've been pushing hard on bringing the Google Cloud Services and App Engine up to speed, and if they can catch more big players early on, it will serve as good demos on how to scale with their systems.

There's a secondary goal here in that it benefits them to have a pool of skilled individuals out in the market who are familiar/expert on the Google platforms/technology.

So if they get a few hundred startups to use Google, most of them fail, a few hold steady, a few become heavy users of Google adn they make some money.

But - there's people from every one of those startups who now are familiar with how to use the Google platform and will potentially recommend/use Google at their next startup.

> vendor lock in.

I think this is the final goal

Nah, I don't think that's the final goal. Individually luring in startups doesn't scale well at all. I suspect they are trying to get a much higher 3rd-party throughput through their services to seed the community with use.

I just wonder whether they might be more successful with this if they explained what they hope to get out of it.

It's probably more than creating awareness for their dev services. From what I can see, they're rapidly increasing partnership efforts for their ad-based products (e.g. AdX integration). Could be a trojan-horse type of move to get in front of developers who will someday be serving ads to generate revenue.

Pretty similar to yours. They seem to be offering incentive for very early startups with spotlighting and ways of improving UX through design/consulting. Not sure how applicable this would be to a startup that knows how to market its target audience, though.

I think the additional value add they're promoting is simply exposure. It's one of the few things that every startup wishes they had more off. I would anticipate signups to be fairly high just for the off chance of increasing eyeballs.

I do know that Google's marketing team has a budget they can utilize for successful partners/resellers to increase exposure. The reasoning behind the budget is that if Google partners succeed, Google ultimately making more money.

I think historically had google played nice with existing startups and not competed against and crushed them, I would be really into this.

There's just more bad than good potential with this company and possible competitors.

I just found out about Polymer by clicking through the site, so I'd say the first point is pretty realistic.