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Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

These tweets are great marketing for his new company Storyworth and I mean that seriously :)

No one (well, almost no one) would have known who this guy was and that a company called Storyworth existed, but now a lot more people will know about it and how the founder is older and wiser now compared to when he was at Google :)

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I've actually been a Storyworth user for quite some time and it's a slick service. It has really helped me connect with my grandmother.

Can't agree more.

Not especially, in my opinion. In light of his comments to the effect that Reader was a failure because it didn't achieve 100M users, I'm not even remotely interested in whatever Storyworth is.

Why? That's not a number he invented, he's saying that that 100m is the user number that would have convinced Google execs to continue funding Reader.

The real question--unaddressed in these tweets--is why Google insisted on such a large user base to keep a project going.

That's fair, and I agree completely. I think I might have misinterpreted his tweet. Which, you know... twitter.

Big companies often have arbitrary guidelines such as "only billion dollar lines of businesses are worth having". In this case 100M users may have been the threshold where $1B/year in revenue from the product was realistic.

It seems like a large number, but at Google's scale it might actually be rather small. Google is a large company, and each product is something that takes resources that could be better spent somewhere else. I don't expect Honda or Ford to keep around a car that only sells a few thousand a year, knowing that it requires continual work and refinement, space in their plants to build, space on the lots to sell, and a business strategy. I don't expect Google to act any differently.

But now you have heard of Storyworth and that's the whole point.

But I could never do business with the guy that shut down Google Reader.

So who are Storyworths competitors? They can have my money

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