Seems like an opportunity for someone else, if it was really being relied on that much.
I suspect it wasn't. The author of the article said he hadn't checked in six years. Six years! And he's complaining that Google threw his work away.
People want to have their cake and eat it, too.
Both. They expanded into an area and killed the competition then killed their product and left a void. See Google Reader for the life cycle.
It's different people complaining in each case.
(Not that it is automatically relevant if it is the same people. But I get frustrated with this general game of moral equivalence somehow being a valid talking point.)
I work in an org with a lot of regulations and a rent seeking IT group different than development. I’ve heard a lot of people rationalizing decisions using emotion (eg, “they complain if we do, they complain if we don’t [;therefore their experience isn’t important to addres]”
It’s tough to solve and is based, I think, on having your measurement of success be a good story, because objective metrics are not really applicable.
In google’s case they make so much revenue and profit from search the rest of the company just kind of bounces around and doesn’t matter. So projects are run, it seems, off who has a great story. Sure, there’s massive data analysis showing things but those don’t matter. Why did a jillion people using finance used to matter, but not now.
I think Google, Facebook, and especially Yahoo did significant damage to their reputations and brands through how they have disposed of products both for consumers and developers. It is really hard to take anything they put out seriously until that product has been around a long time and is clearly being supported, used, and polished.
Google and Facebook are still large, strong, and growing, but what Yahoo did to all of the companies it acquired really fucked both their investors and customers. One wonders if Google and Facebook will wander down that path when their growth stalls out.
Even before Google Finance was shut down, I've wanted to work on this. Given that Google Finance has largely faded, I think we have an opening for https://bravos.co to enter the market.
and then that exact thing happens?
you're confused?
(Full disclosure: I work for https://trade.it which provides the aforementioned broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance)
Couldn’t Google have charged a monthly subscription for the service? Oh you wouldn’t pay for it? Then Google made 100% the right choice in killing it.
(most of it is provided by a third party, or was when I worked for said provider)