Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Oh look, Google has a product called Currents, maybe I should use this infrastructure to build a workflow or even a business on? But wait a minute this is Google, a company who regularly sacrifices products, even ones with millions of users, on the alter of "Focus". Will this Google product be around a few Springs from now? Then why should I even take the risk of learning to use it and maybe depending on it?
You're right, but this is a product that ran for eight years. It was free, showed all signs of being killed for several years now, and can be migrated to another service. I think Google's brand can survive dropping a few products like this after 8 years if they're not going anywhere...assuming of course they continue to innovate elsewhere.
Why the hell haven't people learned yet?
lead with a compelling user experience first and then build an API from there, an API which may be based on open standards, but only if it’s a means to an end.
Although an open standard, RSS is a special case: The DNA of RSS is incompatible with the data-greedy centralization enforced by the Google, Facebook, Twitter and their likes.
Perhaps it's time for an organized "open internet" movement to build protocols and communities that resist the tendency toward centralization of data and control of user experience that's increasingly evident in the services offered by the big players (and even the smaller ones - today, I wanted to post a comment on a blog article, only to discover that the latest version of Disqus has disabled OpenID support).
I think walled-gardenism on the internet has far more dangerous implications than closed-source software ever did, and it's really sad to see this spreading meme of building walled gardens as the only path to commercial success infecting Google.
The question is, when you say "it's time", how do you make it happen? Google tried to make it happen with standards like OpenSocial, but the trade-off for increased flexibility was often poorer UX, and meanwhile they watched developers jump onto standards that were more closed, but had many more users.
There's certainly a sweet spot where open standards meet a mainstream user base; the web and HTML5 overall continue to do fine, notwithstanding heavy competition from the more closed native platforms. This is very much due to the great amount of innovation amongst browsers and web apps, both of which touch the user directly, and less because users care about open for open's sake.
So my suggestion is if you want to encourage open standards, focus on the user first.
I'd say a good starting point would be something akin to the GNU project for protocols and services. Stallman's work made alignment with a particular set of principles the overriding goal of software development, and as much as this is often regarded as an extreme position for prioritizing ideals over the practical value of the software, it's hard to deny that it certainly shifted the 'center' of discourse to a point that gave enough weight to user freedom to enable a thriving ecosystem of open-source software that satisfies both practical use cases and the ideals of software freedom well enough.
We've seen a lot of one-off projects that have attempted to create distributed, user-centric services and protocols - OpenID, Diaspora, etc. - but these haven't aligned into an overarching "open internet movement" where projects build upon each other's work, or endeavored to promote a unified vision of the open internet.
Basically, the principles of an open internet ought to be articulated in a coherent statement of purpose - something akin to the FSF's "four freedoms" - and attached to some effective branding. The ideal needs to become a meme.
Marketing the idea of the open internet shouldn't be too hard: there are already plenty of examples of people's lives and workflows being severely disrupted by service shutdowns, business-model restructuring, security breaches, and so on, to which outsourced non-commodity software-as-a-service offerings are uniquely susceptible.
When we look at the kinds of practical concerns that have lead to this structural milieu - i.e. the situation in which service vendors are actually able to shoehorn their users into walled gardens - the single factor that pops out is the fact that the service vendor itself is in control of the platform on which the server operates, and can therefore modify the structure of the application or protocol without restraint.
The first order of business for a practical solution, and the first kind of product that ought to be developed, is something that breaks that combination, and gives users a level of control over the web applications they use that's akin to what they expect for desktop apps.
What if everyone had their own VPS, with a user-friendly UI to install and configure server-side applications, that give them the ubiquitous access and ease-of-use they're currently getting from webapps while still leaving them in control of their own user experience, and allowed them to choose what products to install, what versions of those products to use, and what features to enable?
A VPS-as-end-user-platform model would break the current platform/service combination that lends itself to walled gardens, and allow the VPS providers to compete on price and quality of their commodity service, while application developers would compete to encourage users to install commercial or free web-based RSS readers, OpenID implementations, social-networking nodes, email clients, etc. onto their own VPS instances.
I don't know what most people expected, but it seems like there were at least some people complaining about the direction the web (or internet as they it called back then) was going even in 1997:
http://www.arachnoid.com/freezone/
The root of the problem is commercialisation, and a lot of people are to blame for that, including the creator of the site you are currently using.
Google became a multi-billion dollar company by supporting and contributing to the open internet over the course of ten years; their current worrying tactics are very recent. So we know that it's very possible to be wildly successful without undermining your customers' interests (and in the long term, undermining your customers' interests is almost always unsustainable).
The problem is that we've got big players like Google and Facebook who have become risk-averse as they grown, and, having maximized the potential of their original founding visions, have shifted into consolidating their positions in order to preserve the status quo at the expense of others. This is a pattern that seems to recur again and again in the industry.
The way to break it, of course, is to be the source of the creative destruction that undermines the status quo - few large, vested enterprises are willing to do this, though, which is why we see them ultimately becoming dinosaurs who are displaced by startups operating under new paradigms.
I'd hoped that Google, given its nature, would be the one organization that might be able to avert the pattern, but I guess not; they should be doing exactly the opposite of what they're doing now, and support a wide range of products and services, and looking for innovative monetization strategies for products that aren't immediately profitable. But instead, they're going for ultra-focus on what seems to work in the here and now, and trying to entrench the status quo, which will take them down the well-trod path to eventual failure.
The majority of the browser usage is with three pieces of software: IE (Microsoft), Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple). None of these players really have a huge stake in 'openness'. We're computing at their mercy right now, and if/when they decide to adopt some new protocols (or drop support for others) we all just have to suck it up. Move to Firefox is a good option right now, but might not be in a few years.
Sure they do; all of the browsers support the same standards in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. The few remaining points of contention between browsers, like HTML5 video formats, are relatively trivial and not significant with respect to the services that are starting to act like walled gardens.
The problems come from the applications and services that use the web itself as a platform, and attempt to "embrace, extend, and exterminate" open protocols, like RSS and OpenID, in order to lock users into relying on proprietary APIs instead of open standards.
As the previous commenter pointed out, the threats today come from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, not from the traditional desktop software vendors. (Only Chrome is really concerning here, since they're attempting to use Chrome as a way of shoehorning users into Google services, much in the same way that Microsoft leveraged their OS dominance in the '90s to boost their desktop applications, especially IE.)
"If the company maintained every niche product with N thousand fans, even paying ones, it’d become the very bungling bureaucracy we love to hate. For a company with Google’s ethos and standing, any such dead-end, non-revenue-producing product that’s retained is holding others back"
For any future CEO's of large companies that might be reading the above please keep in mind that sop for this situation is to sell the product or service to another company. This has typically been how business has always operated. Even if the business lost money there is someone out there who would buy it. Taking the "don't have time for this we are moving so fast" is nonsense. The "distraction" and "rounding error" card is way overplayed.
Why they tend not to do it is is likely because of infrastructure, privacy and security concerns, regulations (EU privacy laws come to mind). And furthermore, they'd need to find a good home for it, or risk further backlash. So there are risks in terms of legal, regulation, and resources. A company like Google can't just transfer SSH keys to the highest bidder on eBay.
All that said, I think in this case, there might be a more compelling reason to make the effort than normal. There's clearly a lot of passionate users, many of them influencers, and it's relatively simple to transfer people's OPML with some extra history data. I can see it's far from trivial though.
Could they, even? They don't build isolated products the same way that many other software companies do. Everything they build is built on their own infrastructure, not some commodity stack. Even if they released the source code to Reader for free, would it do anyone any good without the full suite of BigTable/Chubby/GFS/Googlebot/etc. services that I'm sure it is tightly integrated into?
WTF?
I can just imagine the shareholders meetings... "We've had to put the self-driving car project on hold - Google Reader is just eating up too many resources, and dammit, we just can't afford to innovate with all the hundreds of engineers continually improving Google Reader with new features and functionality. And Maps? Forget ever seeing new functionality there - all our brainpower is trapped up in Reader (and Google Voice, and Wave, and...)".
I don't buy it for a second. What 'true innovations' have they been held back from by having Reader and similar services around?
It seems like you are ignoring some simple business issues.
I hope I am wrong about this, but every article like this simply shouts this out like it's unadulterated gospel truth, bereft of the multitudes of empirical evidence that it is simply not a given.
Google has lots of products that no one's using, why take one away that many people depend on every day? The reason Google's getting rid of Reader is pretty simple, they don't want their own products for consuming and sharing information competing against each other, namely Google+.
I have been using Google Reader for ages, through FeeddlerRSS on my iOS device. For most of that time, I haven't thought for even a second "that's nice of Google, providing this sync service for free". I haven't seem a Google logo or ad, either. In fact, even now that I have been checking whether I actually use Google Reader, it took me quite an effort to find that out.
Given that, why would Google keep that service running for me?
I've still got gmail as an email which I use a lot, but would be extremely hesitant to ever trust them with anything else (I've also got other email I manage on my own). When the sands shift in a few years and gmail doesn't make sense for them any more, they may easily just shut it down, or severely limit it.
Google Business stuff? Would not use it. Google Checkout? I use it, and their tools have not developed at all in the past few years. Google Voice? They have to be losing money on the phone numbers, and I will not be surprised one bit if they shut it off in the next couple years. And people will whine/complain about that too, but the writing's been on the wall for a while - don't trust businesses that you don't pay money to (and don't trust a business to be around just because you pay them either, but it's a start).
I would be amazed if Google became a "media" company and Marissa turned Yahoo back into a "search" company. That would be some weird stuff right there.
"RSS" would be dropped as a concept, since the general Internet user has no idea what that is. Behind-the-scenes, it might still be used though, along with content crawling (something Google already does). The value to Google would be another data point on content ranking. For example, if someone subscribes to a site, that site must be of high value. Time-on-site (or time-on-article) might even be a useful proxy of how engaging that content is, as are tags, social shares, and other meta-actions a user could take on an article.
But perhaps there isn't a big enough opportunity for Google to pursue that. Too bad.
P.S. I'm not a Google Currents user. If I basically described Google Currents, then perhaps Google IS thinking about this. But then, why not merge Google Reader & Google Currents together?
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Clearly Google wants all its user data piped through G+, and developing separate signals for Reader wasn't worth their time. Notice also how they've done absolutely nothing with podcasts since discontinuing the side project that was Google Listen. Unlike iTunes, Google has no podcast directory whatsoever. My guess, they can't reliably index audio so they have no interest in the medium, despite its growing popularity.
I think the reader and podcast stuff have far more to do with focusing on G+ as a "vision", to bolster shareholder view of "google needs to mature and produce a vision for the future", etc.
Someone will come up with a killer audio indexing, google will buy them, then suddenly 'get' in to audio, but they'll also have wasted a lot of time in terms of their own infrastructure surrounding audio/podcasts/etc, when in reality, it's comparatively few resources for them to be spending in the first place.
Equally clearly, they're living in a fantasy world. G+ is a ghost town. I have ~150 people in my G+ circles (lots of friends and acquaintances signed up out of curiosity when it was new) and see maybe 2 new posts per day. My Facebook feed, which has roughly the same number of people, gets somewhere close to 100.
I think they are exaggerating a bit there. Sure, million-dollar businesses are a distraction for Google, but billion dollar ones? Pretty sure they actually like them. It's besides the point of the article, because Google Reader probably wasn't even anywhere near of generating millions in advertising, but still.
Google Reader's role was to contain the fad of ad-free news reading, it also provided rich data about what people read. As soon as they saw the use of RSS fading, they could finally ditch the Reader, hoping it would also further marginalize RSS. They still can mine the Feedburner data, they'll still know what people read.
Did Google also have a role in making RSS unpopular? Would RSS grow bigger if Google didn't come up with the Reader? This would be, ekhmm… a far-fetched hypothesis…
This is a bold assertion with no evidence or argument behind it.
Google can keep its Glasses, its self-driving Cars, its whatever. In the world of Internet's haves and have-nots, the average user would survive even if he has to with Made in China products.
But seriously, you're right that the challenge is in actually designing a good UX for yourself. You've got four months to mimic Reader if that's what you want to do. I'd suggest XSLT, since RSS actually predates JSON, it's so old. That doesn't allow for any potential mistakes by RSS creators, though, which might be hairy. /shrug
Syncing history - could help regarding your reading history (privacy aside.)
Coupled with an 'easy read' mode in the browser (I haven't tried Safari in a long while,) might make for a pleasant experience.
Non of the popular browsers have a good Bookmark UI IMHO, which leads to inappropriate tab use.
Rather begs the question, doesn't it?
The sense I get from reader being discontinued is that it was being kept alive as a best effort, and the effort was becoming too complex, too difficult to take on without real staffing. I suspect "leaving the servers running" was what they were doing for the last few years, and it wasn't working anymore.
Technically, one or two engineers probably could keep something like Reader going, a drop in the bucket for Google, a rounding error. The true cost is not the upkeep, but the costs of the risks. If not investing any significant resources into upgrading and maintaining Reader means some snafu over personal data leakage, then you're looking at being hauled in front of Senate panels, and EU regulators, and civil suits.
Remember, Reader was written a long time ago by an understaffed and under resourced team.
Makes sense, until you realize that Google makes $10+ Billion in profit, and almost all of it it's because of the trust and goodwill factor from the online crowd. Once you start to maximize everything and refuse to leave a penny on the table, that trust goes
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Perhaps it is unfair to Google. However, there is just a rising level of distrust about the kind of company that Google is, or is becoming.
Arguably that trust has underpinned much of their efforts.
For me, too many good things happen through the medium of blogging and RSS, and Google provided a decent gateway to that. Now they've signaled that they don't want to be a part of that.
I don't entirely distrust Google now, but I trust them less.
where does the linked blog post state that?