Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.
My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen.
You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.
Bus factor et al. is literally CS 101.
No, Reader was killed because it:
- was free
- didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads
It is for a company where the promotion culture rewards new initiatives and products and doesn't reward people maintaining products. Which was most certainly the company culture around the time reader was killed.
That's irrelevant to me as a user if I've already invested my time into the product.
To an extent all companies do it. Google just does it much more, to a degree that I tend to ignore most Google's launches because of this uncertainty.
I think we all acknowledge this.
The question is seldom "why" they kill it (I'd argue ultimately it doesn't matter), it's about how fast and what they offer as a migration path for those who boarded the train.
That also means the minute Gemini stops looking like a growing product it's gone from this world, where Microsoft backed alternatives have a fighting chance to get some leeway to recover or pivot.
Microsoft bought FoxBase in 1992. FoxPro never took the world by storm but it had a dedicated group of devs and ISVs who used it and it solved their needs. The last version was released in 2004, long after Microsoft had released.Net and C# and SQL Server. Microsoft officially ended support for it in 2015.
Google? If the product doesn't become an instant #1 or #2 in its market and doesn't directly contribute to their bottom line in a way which can be itemised in their earnings call, it's gone in less than 3 years guaranteed.
Like how many different instant messengers did they make at the same time only to abandon them all instead of just making one and supporting it?
Have you seen Google Bard anywhere recently? Me neither :)
Now I'm not sure if are you arguing that a name change is not supporting a product or that Gemini is a different product with a different feature set?
This isn't some minor consumer play, like a random tablet or Stadia. Anyone who has paying attention would have noticed that AI has been an important, consistent, long term strategic interest of Google's for a very long time. They've been killing off the fail/minor products to invest in this.
After Reader, it was Currents, Google TV, Picasa, Google Now, Spaces, Chromecast Audio,Inbox, GCM, Nest, Fusion Tables, Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Google Bookmarks, Chrome Apps, G Suite....
Reader keeps coming up because after Reader, Google's motto turned into "Do be Evil"
I'm sorry.