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Comment by giblfiz | Hacker News Reader

wait... your saying that because they are discontinuing a product?

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.

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I think it's more a reaction to their general recent policy of doing far less away from their core business. They used to have a ton of projects with a very relaxed attitude about making money from any given project. Now that they've given up on focusing on that much beyond their bottom line, they're acting much more like other large companies which is not necessarily a good thing.

Like self driving cars and Google Glass? Or the cheap/free fiber optic Internet access? Or free Wi-Fi in NYC? I do not think you know what evil means...

Self driving cars are like Microsoft Hailstorm. It's all bombast for now and then somebody clever will steal their lunch. And it is a deviation from their Google core.

And lack of deviation from the core tech that brings in no immediate profit is what tikhonj called "evil".

Like self driving cars and Google Glass? Or the cheap/free fiber optic Internet access? Or free Wi-Fi in NYC?

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.

The claim was that Google was moving away from products with a "relaxed attitude about making money", not "amazing, never done before", and the examples show they aren't.

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.

Also Android, I'd vote for Android over Google Reader every day and associated services like Play/Google Play Music (which is awesome by the way you should check it out) and hardware (Nexus 7). Oh and Go(lang) and Chrome with V8 which lead to Node JS being borne.

What's the point of a car that drives itself if there is nothing to read while you're driving? I was seriously looking forward to that - or even a text to speech app that reads Reader feeds.

My friend, you just won the Best Comment Ever award!

You're asserting that providing free Internet access isn't evil? Have you ever once considered how it benefits Google? What possible motivations Google might have to want to know everything users do online?

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.

This may be the most tinfoil-hat-oriented post I have ever read on HN. To paraphrase: "Google benefits in some way from Google Fiber, so it's EVIL!!!!1"

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".

Well, first, I think you're reading too much into my use of the word "evil". But by your absolutist definition there's no reasonable way Google can violate this ethic they've imposed on themselves.

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.

"discontinuing a product"

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'.

> That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish, extinguish' thing

Google did that to websites too: first they penalized a slew of sites such as local search, travel, finance, shopping comparison for having "shallow content," and then they introduced the Google versions of said sites, on top of everyone else on search results.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. 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. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because ultimately, search engines should be smart enough to understand the semantics of the search to an extern where a special curated vertical isn't needed anymore. When Jean Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for the nearest Starbase, it doesn't tell him to phone up StarBases.com and ask them for a list instead.

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.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites.

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.

Vertical crawlers and linkfarms going out of business is different than publishers going out of business. The web's fertile lifeblood is content, federated, distributed, content accessible by URL. I worry more about newspapers going out of business than comparison shopping sites or RSS readers that never could charge $1 per month, that's nostalgia for a history that never existed.

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.

People seem to be clamoring for subscriptions to ostensibly free services that come at a cost, whether it's the threat of cancellation or restrictive use of their APIs. That's why App.net got so much buzz, remember?

What I said is a problem simply because of Google's market power, power they got by behaving differently. You don't care if people pay on everything they find through Google simply because that benefits Google. You also don't seem to care if Google, with 70%-99% market share penalizes competitors in search.

With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.

What Google did, evil or not, was not EEE. The purpose of EEE was to kill only the competitors' product, not their own, by extending it and making everyone else incompatible with the new formats and/or protocols. That's not what Google did here.

Yea, looking at OGinparadise's comment history, OGinparadise is the one who posted that Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems (I basically just ignore him now): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868

I used search twice and couldn't find I said that, point me to that comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868 Not that there is anything wrong on that, it could have been an opinion on anecdotal evidence. No one expects someone to check prices for 4-5 years first.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186387

You accused me of saying "Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems" when I actually said "In case you didn't know, aggregators like Expedia often have the lowest price" and it's 100% true. What's false about it? Booking directly is in many cases more expensive than booking through a third party that has special pricing power.

You either post the full quote next time or drop it, you're wasting time and not achieving your goal, other than irritating people.

ad hominem much?

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