What is funny is how many lemmings are falling into his trap.
Ironically, I can't really come up with 'better product' in this specific use case.
"Reader killed RSS" feels just wrong. If anything Reader made RSS thrive, because the data source that get sinked into Reader data is RSS.
Reader is a killer product that shifted the landscape because it fills one single role (RSS aggregator with read+fav status syncing), and does it extremely well, in a fantastically unobtrusive way. I sure as hell don't want another Google product as a remplacement, nor another existing or future product integrate RSS aggregation (and certainly not Plus) as part of it. I don't want a kitchensink or mishmash social/news/aggregator app.
Anyone current or past Google employee who put some work on Reader, here's my personal message to you: thank you, your work is awesome.
I also think Google is smart to try to get out in front of the negative press. I think this attempt is solid approach to redirect people's passion in a positive direction.
The only mistake I see, is that nobody spoke up and said, "Reader doesn't have many users, but the users are bloggers and journalists, so we better shut this thing down with an extreme amount of empathy."
In the interest of being constructive, I think they should have:
1) Done a phased shutdown by disabling adding new feeds.
2) Published the API
3) Offer to work with alternative providers to make migration easy.
Then it hit me: That's exactly it. Google+ is Google's way of controlling an entire ecosystem of replies to topics. That's exactly the problem with Google+.
Google Reader was great because it gave you a window into the internet. A window that you could shape however you wanted.
I do not want to share my reading activity with everyone. I just want to sit here on the corner and read. So why make it "social"?
Which seems pretty reasonable.
It's important to remember that to Google products like Reader are blips on the radar. Every second they spent scheming about Reader cost them millions in Ad Sense revenue; hence, there was no scheming.
It seems an inevitable sort of feature.
So the idea that they were surprised by this and are going to start from zero to build a new bit of G+ seems... a stretch.
I assert it's rather more plausible that such plans were under-way and closing Reader was a step to clear the way for a Google+ solution. Because nothing near a unimind would have been required to coordinate it and because the entire migration is more inevitable than not.
Is it possible the Google+ team is sincere in wanting to help people and capture feedback? Sure.
But that's rather orthogonal to the question of whether this statement and the timing of all this is primarily motivated by PR strategy.
He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.
Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.
More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling."
Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.
There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
That people like you assume it's malice, or some conspiracy or evil plot, just saddens me.
Full disclosure: I have empathy, and own GOOG stock.
It could also be that he wanted to redirect some of the passion for google reader in a positive direction. Make Google a bit more empathetic and friendly.
It could be some combination of the two.
I don't see malice here. I think Mr. Zunger made a smart move.
Now if he actually thought he was going to learn something he didn't already know from those comments, that would sadden me.
He is smart enough to realize that comments like those have a huge power-user sample bias and are mostly useless.
My lemmings comment was way out of bounds.
If you worked there, wouldn't you do something similar?
Then again, if I were so smart, I wouldn't have made the lemmings comment. I meant it as a mild joke, though you and other people interpreted it as an serious insult to 500 people and Mr Zunger's character.
So, Google would allow another team to create a clone of what they shut down after all these years? Their excuse was that they need to focus on fewer products
For one, Reader could be built on a very different set of APIs that makes it inherently difficult to maintain.
That's speculation, but it's certainly the kind of thing that has happened at every large company I've ever worked at.
Uh... Gmail pretty much started the "launch your web app as a beta" craze.
Or is this one of those cases where "lol u suk" is the preferred response?