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Comment by arocks | Hacker News Reader

It is not just fans of Google Reader who are shocked, the fans of Google would be too. It goes against their "Don't be Evil" mantra which, as many would interpret, puts common good before sheer commercial interests.

Google might be able to prove that Reader usage has been dropping. However it was still the leading web based solution for reading feeds without any marketing or updates for a long time. As we notice now, people don't even know the alternatives!

A really bad move for the Google brand.

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I'm pretty sure the Google brand is already heavily associated with killing products whenever they feel like it, as they did to Code Search, Google Search API (twice), Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller, Google Dictionary and now Google Reader.

No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.

Nobody forced Google to start up all those loss making services -- which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products.

Stifle competiton? Are you serious? All what Google does is destroying other peoples's businesses for fun - see, we have shitload of money and nothing to do, why we just offer that what you offer, but for free - haha looser.

The fact that google may not be doing doesn't mean this is isn't a known practice, which is actually punished by the law in some places.

Offering your product for free (which smaller competitors will often not be able to do) can drive the competition out of business and be anti-competitve (i.e. evil).

This is not some absurd thing to say. The only question is whether that happened. (I sort of believe it did, at least on some level.)

That doesn’t make Google super-evil in my eyes, but it’s a mark against them.

That's essentially saying that being too competitive is anti-competitive, and frankly, I think it's ridiculous. So what if smaller competitors aren't able to provide the same solutions at the same price? Isn't that why it's called competition? The point is to benefit consumers, not to keep inefficient businesses alive by hurting them.

That said, I think there's some sense in calling anti-competitive when a player lowers the price temporarily, in order to drive out competitors and jack up the prices afterwards. But that's clearly not what happened here.

Nah, reducing the price and bringing it back up is not necessary.

It’s anti-competitive if Google Reader on its own wasn’t profitable and Google nevertheless kept it alive (funding it with money from elsewhere in the company), thus killing competitors.

Then, does that make Hacker News an anti-competitive move by YCombinator? Does it make Free Software anti-competitive?

Maybe it is, but then I say, hurray for the anti-competitives!

No, it doesn’t.

This isn’t a black and white problem.

Agreed -- anti-competitive law is pretty clear on the fact that scale and market dominance in one market cannot be leveraged to gain significant market share in another market for this exact reason

The fact that they have market dominance on another market is immaterial here, they didn't need it to keep Google Reader free. Lots of companies have free online services subsidized by their endeavors, without being dominant. You're posting in one of them right now, for example.

It is absolutely material in competitive and antitrust law. It's not an issue of interpretation or opinion here -- it's applying the same principles that got Microsoft in trouble in the 90's.

>which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products

or, less cynically, to try them out and see what interest they would generate; shutting them down when the interest was not sufficiently great.

I think I would rather that companies try things out and then shut them down, rather than never trying anything remotely new or different in extreme fear that they might fail.

Luckily, at their current profitability that's unlikely to happen until well after your grandchildren are retired.

Is reader really a money drain? The bulk of it is crawling and serving cached text, which is core to google's search anyway.

> No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.

Because that was anyone's argument?

And Google Knol!

To be fair, Google didn't kill Writely. It now lives as Google Docs. There may be other services in your list that are not entirely dead.

What the hell is "evil" about shutting down a website?

Thank you, the day "inconvenience" becomes synonymous with "evil" you'll know you've lost all perspective.

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