Annual reminder: the development effort spent adding an animated minion GIF to Gmail could have kept Google Reader running all year
source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817
source: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/715820699215138817
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-cancel-Reader-rather-th...
Fun fact: Google+ also royally broke the Google contacts feature in Gmail and it still hasn't quite recovered, meaning you can't really trust it when you sync it to other things. I wound up with 2 or 3 duplicates of contacts, some linked to Google+ profiles and some not, that sometimes had invisible connections to each other. They wouldn't merge correctly. Sometimes when you deleted one of them, more than one would disappear and you'd lose everything that was in that contact. They appear to be trying to remedy with this with the new Contacts web app that's in beta.
The contacts in Android seem totally fubar lately.
Knowing it's due to the G+ POS clears things up a bit.
Edit: I have Google Fi
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
They just got rid of one of the two available operators; quotes were there 10+ years ago.
Thanks buddy.
At least that's what I heard somewhere back then when they broke the + operator.
This is the top reason that I use Gmail for "signing up to websites that I don't trust with my privacy." I use it for nothing else.
When I set it up to sync my contacts, I'd get contacts on my phone from spam/notifications that found their way into my inbox. Hundreds of "noreply@" contacts. Maybe that wasn't exactly the case (long time ago, can't remember), but I did end up with many useless contacts that obscured the 60 or so contacts that I care about. "So just turn it off," okay, but now I still need to go and clean up hundreds of contacts.
The whole platform tries to be so functional that it ends up being useless. Office365 is entirely unspectacular, apart from some unacceptable login flaws (Live vs. personal O365 vs. work O365 account is a mess) it's satisfyingly adequate.
Less is more. What it has become is such a pity, I opened my Gmail account when it was still invite-only and it was such a pragmatic client. I'd switch back to that Gmail in a heartbeat.
And this is all only about code, not about the cost of keeping the service running with good availability on old infrastructure.
The TL;DR is: Maintenance is never free.
If you look on the Google file system, it has no support for deleting files (data is overwritten) and Google itself has a running business model around hoarding data, would make no sense to lose something that might be valuable to them in the future just for the sake of saving some storage.
I can only speak about browser history sync, but it gets deleted after 6 weeks.
Someone broke something and it was producing mangled data. 6 weeks was the "cliff" for when mangled data stopped being visible.
Mangling data is an interesting thing you raise. Would reveal some issues with their professionalism. Albeit after the disaster we watched today on their April's 1st joke, I wouldn't be surprised if indeed that was the (sad) case as you mention.. :/
Of course, this is the point of the tweet. It's not supposed to be a literal equation of LOEs.
I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.
Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.