Google is about to learn a tough lesson
blog.calbucci.com
blog.calbucci.com
Oh come on: enough already. Obviously there was a /vocal/ user base which is very loudly now upset that the product is being sunset. Guess what, Google didn't see it as a large enough set of people to make it worth monetizing. Such is life. Move on. It's certainly not the end of Google if that's what this article is trying to imply. It isn't even the beginning of some horrible backlash either. It is however getting old.
The vast majority are just shrugging and not caring one bit.
Only Google has the actual numbers on how many people are using their Reader, and they simply did the math. End of story. It's not going to affect Google one bit that they cancelled a tiny non-profitable product.
Though, the majority of people here aren't using Google Reader - so I guess I'm a minority there - but they're using "Bloglovin".
They're pretty large it seems.
I realize I won't be getting things like the recommendations, but I've got plenty of feeds going presently. There may well be other features others love that I've been missing out on, but obviously I won't be missing them :-P
The problem is that some minorities count more than others, because they are influential (vocal, if you prefer).
The big question, which TFA states but provides no evidence for, is whether pushing these influencers away from Reader also pushes them away from other services, too.
My personal opinion is, by itself, no; but if you make Reader the frosting on a cake of discontinued products, it just might. Now, the general unease of "Will this thing I care about get terminated next spring?" becomes a much stronger fear, because it is tied to the personal emotions of Reader being killed.
Math is useless without a good model. The article challenges their model and rightly so.
Maybe you don't realise how many they are?
I mean, your very next line admits total ignorance:
>I don't use RSS or Google Reader, I've never even seen it
Thing is, people who have successful technical blogs know that lots of people come from Google Reader.
So even if it's a minority, it's a pretty important minority in the business.
They do: Contributors (curators) are, grossly, 9% of total users (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...)
The few that cared posted their angry rants, and noone cared. Noone commented. It's a complete non-issue.
And even if you accept the premise of the article, that the ones who care about Google Reader are influencers, what exactly does that mean in practice? Google doesn't have very many services that regular people use. There's search, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's gmail, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's Google+, and you'll never get people to use that, because they've got Facebook, and it's only nerds on G+ anyway.
I get the abstract point of the article, that if you upset influential people, they'll badmouth your product, and the Microsoft Word example made a lot of sense, because it stopped people from buying the latest version of it and sticking with what they had.
But that scenario doesn't apply here. Those of you who are upset about this, exactly which Google services will you stop promoting to your friends, and which alternatives will you suggest?
The main issue for RSS seems to be that no one bothered to explain it in direct terms to all the tens of millions of people who rushed into the web starting around 2007.
The idea that you can't rely on Google to keep services around is a bit of a chilling one for many and too much of that vibe may well mean that established companies and smart startups are more careful about what services they depend on (and who they get them from).
But we're not at that point yet... and Google is hardly alone in the general rug-pulling-out-from-under-you trend these days.
I think the coolest feature of it was its massive database of RSS feeds. I liked being able to flip through tons of categories and add them. However, it wasn't enough to keep me coming back, and that's probably why Google is discontinuing it.
I wish there was some way to export all those feeds, though.
What surprises me most is that Microsoft, which has a severe case of Google envy hasn't created a web based RSS service of it's own. They should make an offer to buy Reader and Feedburner too, since Google seems to have little interest in supporting these products.
That pretty much describes my relationship with Twitter, and almost none of my friends use Twitter. But I don't think Twitter is any less important for that; likewise, don't let your lack of interest in Reader blind you to the fact that it has high utility for others.
Curiously, some products that are moribund for more time still alive (e.g. Orkut).
Several tens of thousands of highly influential people are now less likely to speak well of google, less likely to install chrome on a friend's computer, less likely to urge a parent to switch to gmail, etc.
I don't know how big the effect will be; less likely is a relative term. (this confuses people to no end) But the effect will be stronger than numbers alone indicate.
etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...
I love Gmail/Calendar/Maps/DamnNearEverything. I love Groups, which they've recently taken pains to hide[1] so I suspect its up soon for the chopping block. Heck I even love Google+.
All that said, at least they had the gall to kill it. One thing that pains me more than killing a product they don't want is letting one languish broken for ages.
I'm fully in the G-cosystem[2] but sadly Google Finance is nearly worthless, and only edited about once a year, usually to break something and fix it a month later.
You can't switch to a current (non-closed) holdings view where it only shows you information about stocks you own right now, instead you have to make two portfolios. You can't reorder portfolios so my real portfolios and my "lookers" are separated in an awkward list. News stories are half spam and appear out of order anyway. Finance doesn't sync well with the Android app, sometimes it finds zero portfolios and makes me make temporary mobile ones that I have to delete later.
How many Java errors are on the Finance homepage today? Just one. How about on a stock ticker page? Thirty-one. And it's still using Flash.
I don't think the Reader backlash will hurt Google. There are just some products they plainly don't care about and will continue to ignore them until somebody brushes over the "shutter" button while the rest of the company shrugs.
~~~
[1] http://i.imgur.com/bs7i5pL.png
Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.
[2] I cringed writing that but it was too good to let go.
An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!
I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.
That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.
Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.
What about a cloud-based app that kept synced across your devices? I wonder if it would be possible to create a client that would let you quickly read Twitter, app.net and feed content, and filter the latter two? (So long as you stay below the 100,000 user mark?)
some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.
you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.
so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.
a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.
> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once
I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.
They have been really destroying Groups for a while now. The new ui is terrible, the new url format is also bad. They got rid of instructions for emailing for subscriptions, and someone reported to me earlier today that emailing list+subscribe@googlegroups.com doesn't even work anymore.... are they just going to dump their usenet archives?
Agreed about finance too. It's too bad it's so crappy.
"Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars?
Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields.
The lesson they learned correctly was that focus is essential. RSS is dead. A handful of nerds enjoy it, it solves a handful of problems, but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
So they cut it and they're not even going to notice it in the rearview mirror.
In an amusing, if anecdotal, aside – Gina Trapani, an OG nerd influencer if ever there was one, tweeted that she'd checked out of Google Reader long ago.
What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles?
RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user.
It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.
Indeed,
> but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.
To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search.
If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem.
Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"
To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.
Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.
Aren't you a charmer.
I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow.
And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface.
It's a damn good moat.
Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.
Search is the moat for me. Switching email is not nearly as big of a deal.
I am sad Google is getting out of this market, since that brings me inconvenience of migration. But I'm sure the niche will be filled in.
Google's dominance in search has nothing to do with customer switching costs. They are dominant because, imperfections and privacy issues aside, they legitimately have the best performing search engine on the market. They are able to retain this position because search is an extremely difficult and resource intensive technical problem (like mapping), that nobody has been able to credibly challenge them on since they took over.
If someone builds a better search engine than google, then yes, their position will be precarious, regardless of the other ways they've roped people in. But none of the current crop of competitors give any reason to believe this is imminent.
While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store.
I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain.
That probably won't be the case any more.
So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer.
This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone
Maybe my point is better illustrated by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495
I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.
Google knows what they're doing. They haven't forgotten the outrage that happened after they stripped the social features out of reader and replaced it with the +1 button. They knew all those people and more would be pissed. And they decided it didn't matter.
But now they are definetely killing it, and it will affect the users in a different way. They are trashing away the app so there's no way a user can simply adapt. Before you could say "well, at least I can keep reading the feeds". Now you got nothing.
About influencers, well, there are lots of people with a good chunk of influence using GReader. They might make a dent on how people perceive Google's app reliability. Even a small one could end up in some financial loss. If it would be significant to them, only time will tell.
By the way, have you noticed that the Google+ still didn't catch up? What if it's Google Reader users fault? Think about it.
Yep. I was just investigating Cloud SQL storage today and Google has a free Cloud SQL trial plan and decent pricing. I passed it over because I am concerned Google isn't interested in long term maintenance of products, and their support is non-existent. I'd rather go with some no-name startup that probably cares a lot more about my business.
Google platforms like Cloud SQL generally have a deprecation policy that will give you an idea of the minimum length of time that they'll be maintained. For Cloud SQL it's 1 year (it's in the Terms of Service), which means that you'd get at least a year's notice before it could be turned off. It's on par or slightly better than what I know of Amazon's policy (they have 1 year deprecation on their APIs and an undefined deprecation policy on their service offerings).
In my opnion having this deprecation policy would make Google Cloud SQL a lower risk proposition than a 'no-name startup', at least until the startup is in a position to make similar guarantees (and the financial resources to stick to those guarantees).
Edit: I guess my point is that some Google products have service agreements as to how long they'll be maintained and so comparing consumer web services to Cloud SQL isn't really appropriate.
Ever noticed how Facebook kills a feature? Slow, steady, they drift you away, showing you by hand what better is out there, and then the feature disappears, first from our conscious, and then from the website. If FB was the one calling shots here, they probably would have somehow merged G+ and Reader, and then slowly started to show us those stories better using Currents, and by the time everyone is comfortable, would have killed Reader.
Google doesn't get design. It has to be in everything. Even in killing products off, there is design. You can't design with a corporate sledgehammer. All they seem to be doing is kill off established niche products in hopes of somehow making a niche social network successful. If only someone builds a better search engine, right this moment.
Additionally RSS allows me to follow far more things than would normally be possible. Instead of 10 I have 100, including things that don't update even every month.
Previously the discussion was always about how to make RSS usable for the masses, but I suppose this problem was never solved. Social media seems to work for some people, but it isn't the same. I can only count a handful of times in the last decade that I site I was interested in didn't have an RSS feed. It is practically universal. Facebook does indeed have a lot of people, but there is also the constant friend spam, and the algorithmic filtering to worry about.
When I look at the alternatives to Google Reader, it is clear that many of them don't get me. They are focused on content discovery, but i want to do is Keep Track. I don't want to miss a word from my favorite sources, and I need my reader to hold on to their words until I get to them.
I really hope RSS doesn't die. It is my handle on the internet, and without it I would still be refreshing sites all day.
I would eat information. I would get a new post every 30 seconds. I would spend my days just sitting at my desk and archiving what didn't seem of interest and read the rest.
After a few month I started realizing I wasn't enjoying what was written anymore. I wasn't enjoying visiting a website, its design, its UI (And I know the saying, we're not supposed to learn a new UI every time we browse a new website, but I like seeing a websites renovating its design, I like reading an article in its real environment )...
I decided to ditch it. I didn't need the technology. Nobody needed the technology. I didn't mind opening multiple tabs to check different websites.
I use bookmarks, multi row toolbar and tree style tab on Firefox and it's all I need for my big consumption. And I'm a power user. So imagine the normal users, why would they care about Google Reader?
I subscribe to about fifteen developer blogs that update only two or three times a year. Huge waste of time to visit their websites, but whenever anything important happens, I'll know.
I subscribe to the New York Times' main feed. I don't read most of the articles, but I'll flip through all of the headlines for ones that I want to look at. Much faster than the main site.
I'll Option-R right before I leave the house, so if I'm stuck without internet for a while (the cell phone connection is very spotty on a commute I make) I can still read the news and the blogs I'm interested in.
It doesn't fit your use case, but that doesn't mean no one needs RSS.
This is the EXACT use case I desperately need it for.
Half of my friends use Gmail because I suggested that they switch. I am starting to see Google move toward the dark side, and that means you won't see me recommending Google products to friends. It'll take a while, but there will be backlash... because I'm not the only one in this boat.
Axing the reader makes my private and professional life/work way more complicated. That is the first time that a Google believer like me feels they pulled the rug under me.
There's an underlying sense of entitlement in the tech community that really rubs me the wrong way sometimes, honestly. Sometimes folks are going to make decisions that you don't agree with. That doesn't justify freaking out. "Getting disappointed" shouldn't be filed in the same drawer with "getting cheated" or other such violations.
It's important to differentiate between what other parties are obligated or have promised to do, and what you want them to do. Failing to deliver on the latter is not a violation of trust. It's like saying someone you dated is untrustworthy because they decided to break up with you and they didn't find you someone new to date.
Maybe some of the resentment here is from the lingering feeling that Google should still be the best thing on the internet. For quite a long time, everything they did, they did so amazingly well. I loved that company.
They got worse, the rest of the internet got better, and they really don't stand out the way they did. But sometimes I forget that the new Google isn't the same as the old Google, and I feel stung about things like this.
(FWIW, I don't blame them for doing something about Reader. I just wish they had tried selling it on subscription before fitting it for concrete shoes.)
Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
The best leaders, the best organizations, the ones that create excellence, are those that are as good at saying no as they are at saying yes.
I've worked at a large company. It is easy for outsiders to think "oh, they have infinite resources and can do anything". This is not the case at all.
I am not much of a Google fan. I dropped Reader about 2 years ago and have used NewsBlur since. The only Google product I like is Chrome.
Google will continue to be successful, not by doing a bazillion little things poorly, but a few things, really, really well.
And to do a few things, really, really well, you have to be excellent at saying no. Google has decided Reader is a little thing it could not do really, really, well. So it is saying no.
I applaud that. (Even if it's caused NewsBlur to become almost too slow to use).
Google doesn't say "No." They say "Yes... yes... yes... no! Just kidding! Psych!"
I can't tie my personal or corporate strategy to that.
I'm curious what uses there are for this specific type of loss-leader (as in not the Dropbox freemium type). Ethics aside, for instance, Google could have tried to steer conversation among an influential group toward certain topics, by more aggressively suggesting certain Google blogs to follow, or specific stories relevant to Google.
I'm also very curious what other such loss-leading services exist. One example is this forum. It advertises to potential founders with the small banner ad at the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. It also provides an ecosystem for the discussions about and (indirect) promotions of organizations or ideas YC invests in (like Watsi, or job postings).
The other example I can think of is "high-brow" political magazines like The National Review. Often, parties dedicated time and money on promoting ideas there, even though it's a very small segment of the entire market of voters.
Has anyone here designed a service or product with this specific aim in mind? How did you use it to further some broader agenda?
So they offer big academic discounts to try to keep them in the Microsoft ecosystem.
They throw tantrums. They throws hissy fits. They scream bloody murder. They divine doom and gloom for Google about how severely this will affect it in much more important markets like Android and Chrome.
And yet the world is not ending, and not every Facebook wall has this petition [1] plastered all over. Even GOOG stock underwent as a much as a correction, still hovering comfortably above $800.
What did happen, though, is that self-important "opinion leaders" had their illusions of power dispelled. No wonder they are furious.
[1] https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...
Instead it looks like everyone else is going to learn tough lesson - Google isn't a charity, and anything that doesn't provide them any strategic value and/or revenue can be discontinued.
The danger is that they've tasted Microsoft-level power in their ascendant Android/Chrome business, and want more.
There is a lot to be said about "leaving something on the table" and not maximizing everything. When you're the largest collector of personal data (other than perhaps the US Govt), you need goodwill or (influential) people will revile you.
There are plenty of reasons to not buy into the Google Ecosystem, but this is not one of them. Then again, all we need to do is wait a few months and see if the earnings report supports the OP's claim or Google's strategy. My money is ong Google.
please explain how twitter and facebook are open protocols so i can suscribe facebook or twitter feeds on the long run without my facebook/twitter reader client breaking because of changes in the api or without having to create an account on their plateform.
RSS exists because it allows free flow of information. I dont recall facebook or twitter being open plateforms that promote interoperability.
A preference for having things automatically sorted into neat categories may not be as unusual as you think.
Why is that kind of maturity good these days? For whom?
* http://misc.si.umich.edu/media/papers/wsdm333w-bakshy.pdf
* http://www.digitaltonto.com/wp-content/uploads/WattsandDoddi...
"Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web," the book by Paul Adams @ Facebook (http://www.amazon.com/Grouped-groups-friends-influence-socia...), talks a bit about this.
Anecdotally, I've also seen quite a bit of evidence first hand that suggests the impact of influencers is not clear-cut.
I think Google's better move would have been cut a few features and 'Plus-ify' Reader - kinda like they have been doing with their other products. They would have evolved an important user base, shown commitment to the RSS standard, and kept a number of important apps using their api's.
Aren't they after all supposed to be championing the open web?
I don't think this is intentional, but it now hard to argue againsT people saying that they intentionally waited till they killed the RSS readers market and then shut down their product.
No, but you may start seeing instances of phrases like "I wonder how long it will be until FeatureX/ProductY gets the boot like Reader did" or "Perhaps this product will languish for years without innovation like Reader" or "Maybe Google will opt to ignore users of this product too" in the press related to Google products. Next time Google kills a product, the media will reflect about how it's "just as bad as what they did with Reader in 2013." Killing widely used products is now something Google does; it is a behavior they are now strongly associated with.
In terms of influencers, it's not about the individual product, it's about the behavior of the company that operated it. Don't piss off the people that give you free advertising by taking out features they like, even if they're the only ones who use them.
>> a product no one knew existed
While I find that a stretch, the point the article was making is that no one needs to know of the existence of Reader for this to have a negative impact on Google. Except for the influencers, who did.
This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
From former Microsoft employee Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html He has links to reviews in the original
There are stories, though, of Microsoft shipping out beta copies of Microsoft Word with debugging all turned on, which made it slow, and despite saying so very carefully to all reviewers who got a copy, they still got torn apart for it being slow. I think the story is in "Coding The Microsoft Way" which I haven't seen in over a decade.
Google cancelled a product. It let you read websites quickly. There are other ways to do it. Moving on...
As an average Joe, I am preparing to go on Google-free diet come July 1. Firefox, Bing, Outlook. Will find a reader somehow. These are the daily habits which accumulate over time and provide GOOGLE what it needs to survive. So will do everything possible to cut down the ...
But I don't think the future will belong neither to Google+ nor Facebook. I'm looking forward to a descentralized, user centric platform, that anyone can run on its raspberry pi box at home, that allows you to manage your data however you please.
So what are the good alternatives to Blogger? And what if you have multiple blogs with hundreds of posts in them? Reader at least is emphemeral, there's no investment of work at risk.
And it's not a peripheral service like Blogger. Automattic is WordPress.com, and all their peripheral products exist to serve it. The best part? You can take your WordPress.com and turn it into an identical WordPress.org with a billion different service providers.
I know lots of companies rely on and pay for GMail, I'm sure it won't be discontinued anytime soon, but I'm also sure this event puts thoughts in the back of many people's minds about that eventuality.
- As many people know things were pretty stagnant on Google Reader. Though it worked for a lot of us, products like Google+ were always going to get more focus. In this way Google might have done us a service by retiring a product it was not developing fully.
- Wonder if the product name was a limitation in itself. Google Reader was always going to be a reader even if you add social stuff into it. If that is the case, maybe they should rename Google Finance to Google Money!
- People are asking if we can trust with Google on providing all these free services. Pragmatic among us say "NO" and will remind us that they have been saying this for ages. Optimistic among us say, well "Gmail", "Youtube" etc. are for "forever".
- Most people like Google services because it means "one login", and it goes all the way to help Android as well. Even if some people are considering their relationships with Google, it is not in Google's best interests.
- Another side effect of the above is - what happens on next spring cleaning? Should I wait to use a product until that product acquires enough momentum? I will be a bit more hesitant to recommend other Google products.
- There is a debate going on between free and paid services. I think it is more about getting a right business model. Services can fail even if you pay them. Most people are not going to pay more than $5/$10 a month for a service like this.
- A big opportunity for a company like Yahoo to get an app for all the devices, and among the influencers. I will be surprised if they don't try to raise their game on readers and provide a better "Google Reader". (this advice is for other companies as well, however I believe, yahoo, will be the one to grab it.)
- Was a bit surprised with all the bitching going on at hacker news. I mean, let them close it, we will have another one or built a new one! And, no petitions please.
Key takeaway: it's not the 'vast majority' that bring about innovation and change on the web. It might be Google doesn't care about innovating on the web front anymore, at least less than the hardware and integrated systems fronts. So ironically, this might actually hurt Plus.
They aren't going to be benevolent dictators of the internet forever - we should be thankful that their benevolence has lasted so long (and still is lasting through many free services provided).
Nop. There is no lesson to be learnt.
They have been doing that for years. I'm not sure if anything but Search and Gmail are safe from the axe. They'll probably not end-of-life Maps or G+, but almost anything else should probably be treated as a beta that can be removed at will.
Reminds me of what Apple is doing with the Mac Pro.
" They throw parties or they give away free samples or they advertise in particular publications that brand themselves as reaching an influential audience and run some campaign in their normal manner. And if it works, they say, "We reached the influencers." And if it doesn't work, they say "We didn't reach the influencers" or "We weren't able to make them help us." In that sense, it's just a rhetorical device to help you explain the randomness that you actually experience in the world. "
It's my homepage and I'm sure millions of other people's homepages. Setting your homepage to an internet company's site is pretty much their whole goal. It's insane to me that they will give this up.
That always felt hokey to me. I was always more likely to "homepage" a website that just gave me great content and proportionately less likely to "homepage" a site that wanted to be my home page. This is why HN/reddit are basically this for me.
My nameless millions and I no longer have a 'homepage' - the browser just starts with the tabs I had open last time.
I see a lot of passionate tweets over just another web service. If Google wasn't killing the service, but asking users to spread the word to keep the service, would they be so passionate about it then? Maybe. People don't often go to Twitter when their service is working, generally when they're pissed (unless the service is mind-blowing great). I just don't think all the whining is going to do much convincing at this point, or that it will impact Google all that much.
They can't have anything holding Google from becoming what they think Facebook should be.
In fact, they don't just want to become/defeat Facebook, but also Apple (see Nexus/Chromebook) and Amazon (see Shopping Express), not to mention Groupon (see Offers). By trying to be all things, they will become none.
They are on the path to becoming Microsoft. I desperately hope that the Glass/Driverless-car part of the company prevails in corporate culture. I fear that will not be the case.
> By trying to be all things, they will become none.
Now they'd do things to be profitable first, and cool as a side effect.
It's arguable which iterative path leads to a greater market social and market impact.
Sounds more like Yahoo to me.
To me this is like if in 2002 Microsoft had decided to stop making Internet Explorer and force everyone to use a different browser - quality browsers would have been developed and adopted a lot faster.
If op is right about Google Reader users, then the same thing is happening with OS X users. A part of the reason for OS X's success was adoption by influencers. Samsung, Android, and others have made a lot of inroads on influencer groups.
I don't give a %$@*%& about "social"...
Mission #1 is now to find another service that will reliably feed RSS feeds into Reeder.
I guess Google don't care
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512566/unintentional-in...
While I've lost a little respect for Google, I am overall happy to find a better RSS reader alternative.
But seriously, to put it mildly my friend, I don't agree with you. Google determined that the best thing to do was to kill it and they did. They continue building other stuff; life continues.
This is a compelling argument in favor of DRM-free desktop applications.
> Oh, and I’m pissed with Google Reader going away. I used it 3-10 times a day to consume about 100+ feeds.
look, if you want to have a more effective RSS reading habit, use rss2email http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ and plug into the power of email-filtering. you don't even have to go to some "reader" to get updated.
What?
Nothing is sacred anymore, no matter how much they repeat http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/
I'm not suggesting that google is/isn't evil these days, but I would suggest that there is absolutely no moral aspect to discontinuing a feed reader.
You either post the full quote next time or drop it, you're wasting time and not achieving your goal, other than irritating people.
Self driving cars, like this http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57367893-71/a-self-driving... or http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/04/autos/toyota-self-driving-ca... or http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416535,00.asp ?
Tell me what's so amazing, never done before, about Glass? Google is seeing ads there.
Fiber and WIFI, while extremely limited in geography* and are great, until Google pulls the plug. That's the point.
*There's no "Free wifi in NYC from Google", just in a tiny neighborhood.
until Google pulls the plug. That's the point.
Google has always done that. I don't understand where the rose colored glasses about Schmidt's time come from.
So, here it is: Google does nothing altruistically. They are an ad company, and search is a fundamental component in service to that. Data collection is one fundamental pillar, establishing Google search on every device is another.
Surely you can see how utterly insane that is? Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Google Fiber is 100% altruistic by any means. The position that a large base of Fiber installations would put them in is enviable in a number of ways, involving several of the markets they're involved in. However, completely dismissing the possibility that they saw an opportunity to disrupt the necrotic oligopoly BS we have in the ISP market and jumping straight to "EVIL!!" is beyond ridiculous. Google certainly has done a lot of things in the last few years that belie their early image, but the amount of times that "evil" has been thrown around to describe them is just laughable.
tl;dr: The definition of "not evil" is not "a 100% charitable endeavor with no conceivable benefit".
Any company of sufficient size will be "evil", in that they will act in an anti-competitive, anti-user, or anti-interoperability way if it benefits their stock price. There is no other consideration. I'm sure everyone can think of things Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook have done that they would consider "evil" by that definition.
Building a fiber network with the primary goal of gathering data on what users do online (perhaps after clicking on a Google search result from the Google Chrome browser), and being able without any trouble whatsoever to tie that back to an individual is, if not "evil", at least fairly creepy. And there are plenty of other benefits to controlling user access literally from the desktop to the Internet backbone.
Google is not unique in this. Every large software company is trying to wall off users so they can control their access. Google, however, enjoys enormous goodwill with some people as a result of their motto and innovator status.
I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.
When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.
Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.
If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.
Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typical of companies that gain a monopoly in a field. You can argue that they might have a right to do it, not that it is the right thing to do. If major websites go out of business, how is the web better off? Google produces no content and now wants to send no clicks to the producers.
>> When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it.
Yes, but Google decided that they have the best reviews and best price. Either way, they gained share by being nice and now they are on top, with lots of money to buy off protection from politicians. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/google-accumulat...
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly.
Google clones everything and when those cloned go out of business, consumers lose. Any hope that they may charge $1 /month vanishes when Google clones their app /features.
Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
Mozilla is one company, Google clones a product and uses it's billion users to have it adopted. Imagine if Microsoft used that muscle to have users adopt Bing or IE, by showing ads for them virtually each time you went online.
The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.
There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.
If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.
Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.
With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.
Yes, it is. However, not because of the Reader. It happened years ago, you just didn't notice :)