Free works
marco.org
marco.org
Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be good for my product" [1].
So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are numbered.
[1] http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper
The Internet wasn't built on AOL or IE, and it shouldn't be forced to ad hoc proprietary standards, especially if you have to give up privacy to communicate with people. I'm eternally grateful that Facebook and Google+ haven't supplanted email in my social circles and I can still run my own web and email server.
First, Marco pretty explicitly said he wasn't in favor of regulation:
Much of our rapid progress wouldn’t have happened if we had to play by the rest of the world’s rules, and I think we’re better off overall the way it is.
The best thing we can do isn’t necessarily to try to pay for everything, which is unrealistic and often not an option. Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures.
free/open: no problem if you have altruistic developers
free/closed: seems great, but problems can happen (google)
paid/closed: generally works, vulnerable to predatory pricing
paid/open: lots of companies experimenting with this model
IOW it's good for the customer right up until the One True Product is shut down, or there's no viable business model anymore.
The risk seems to be more in the camp of the company. If it's open, someone could undercut them more easily than if it was closed. So the onus is placed more on the ability of the company to continually add value through services or the kind of innovation that led to the product in the first place, rather than just protecting their IP.
I think that, to be fair to Google, they could not have predicted the popularity of Reader, and the resultant growth in responsibility along with it.
Hands up, who would give a shit if Reading List got axed tomorrow?
There is a cognitive dissonance, as you bring up, because Reader is in a sense a service the same way Reading List is.
Apple made Reading List, because such services were popular to the extent that Apple wanted to give people a native solution. That's hardly much different from what Google did, except we impute a less noble incentive on their part - user adoption, ad impressions. Or perhaps it's that we are left to impute their incentive to dicontinue it - G+ redirection.
This has nothing to do with free: it has to do with a failed product like any other, plain and simple. People don't see Google Reader as a failed product because they like it and "a lot of people use it". But that "a lot" is in absolute terms, not relative ones. The reality is that not enough people use RSS for it to matter at Google scale. Even if everyone currently using it were to start paying for it tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket of Google profits. Reader had it's chance, and it failed to get enough traction, period. The "free" part is just a distraction in this conversation, Reader makes no sense as a product for Google at any (reasonable) price. This story would have gone down exactly the same had Google offered reader at a price that matched the other competitors at the time: they probably still would have won, and still would have ended up shutting it down.
This is exactly the same as how having the Mac Pro line would be incredibly lucrative for you or me, but it just doesn't matter for Apple. The margins are through the roof on that thing, and in a lot of ways its quite possibly the perfect product: a 3 year old machine that commands the same price it did 3 years ago. But again, not enough people want it for it to matter at Apple scale. If Apple could double the price and maintain the same sale numbers of the Mac Pro, it still wouldn't be worth it for them.
If anything, we should see this as a really healthy market correction. Its good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers and profits are meaningful.
But it doesn't, and Google is not a charity. Whether you believe them to be "open" or not (meaningless statement), being "open" certainly does not commit you to supporting arbitrary protocols indefinitely for the good of the world, especially ones that most people don't use. RSS had its shot, it just can't compete in today's web.
And we'll see for just how long you can still buy the Mac Pro.
It does have a former employee saying Google+ is more of a focus for Google than Reader, but that isn't remotely the same and everyone knew that for quite a while.
After all, before Google Reader’s sharing features were converted to corresponding Google+ ones, users of the soon-to-be-killed service used to share like crazy. Shih postulates, with plenty of logic, that this activity dropped as Google pushed Reader users to sharing on Google+ instead.
If you strongly want "open" to beat "closed social", then maybe RSS dying might be a step in a positive direction, since its had its shot, and proved to just not be useful for people. Now, I personally feel RSS neither hurts nor helps "closed social" in any way, so I think its inconsequential.
But that's it. Anyone I find interesting enough to follow ends up in Feedly.
Every conclusion derived from here is then flawed.
Google moving from Reader (RSS/Atom) to Current (unspecified protocols) is less open.
Google moving Calendar from CalDAV to their proprietary Calendar API is less open.
Google potentially moving Talk from XMPP to an unspecified proprietary protocol is less open.
Etc.
Even more importantly, if you already purchased a Mac Pro, you can still use it. Indefinitely, until it breaks beyond repair.
As a result, I could not get upgrades for some software that required Mountain Lion to use. That, combined with the lack of upgrades, forced me to replace my Mac Pro with a custom built Linux box. It now sits idle in the corner.
But it's not. If you have a Mac Pro now, you can continue to use it as long as you want. Google Reader disappears in July.
Whether you believe Google "won" by offering it for free or not is inconsequential in my mind. My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it, because the product simply doesn't make sense to them in the same way the Mac Pro really just doesn't make sense to Apple.
this is ridiculous the last few days on HN were filled with alternatives. Google allows you to export your feeds so nothing was lost.
1. It dominated its niche because it was a legitimately good product, not just because it was free. There have been many free alternatives for a long time, even before Reader. For example if every Mac user actually used the built in RSS readers that ship with OS X they would have eclipsed the Reader userbase.
2. The fact that it is a small niche (and more importantly isn't really growing) probably better explains the "lack" of alternatives.
The fact of the matter is that when Apple finally kills off the Mac Pro there actually won't be (lega) alternatives, unlike the current situation with RSS where there are plenty of alternatives (its just that Google's was way better). This is my whole point: Google won on quality, decided it wasn't worth it for them, and then exited. Had they priced it from the beginning (either through ads or freemium or whatever), they would have still won in my opinion, and then still killed it. Reader winning and going away has nothing to do with free in my mind: there is just no universe where Google would continue supporting an RSS product because RSS is not a big enough market.
I guess my point is that Google would have "killed the space" no matter what, not because they made it free.
> The fact of the matter is that when Apple finally kills off the Mac Pro there actually won't be (lega) alternatives,
I don't know what you are talking about, the Mac Pro is a tower computer, there are many alternatives today and there will be many alternatives when the Mac Pro goes away, Apple doesn't dominate the tower computer market.
> Its good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers and profits are meaningful.
What about the universe where someone decides that keeping the goodwill of the (yes small, but as we've seen in the past week very vocal) Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode?
What makes you think it is a minuscule cost? Crawling the millions of feeds and updating the XML parsers as feed formats change is going to cost very real dollars.
If Apple decides to kill the Mac Pro line, the Mac Pros that have been sold don't suddenly cease to function. But on July 1, Reader will no longer work neither on the website nor on any of the apps using the API.
Perhaps the organizing being done was too tech-focused to be of enough value in any other category, or Google is confident enough in algorithms to drop the parallel system. Or, as was stated, their wasn't enough participation at all.
Many of the people in my social circle that were big Google Reader users stopped using it because it was much more difficult to share articles that we'd browse while at work.
(Though I'm not sure that he's entirely against regulation, as some in this thread have suggested.)
I don't understand how Marco can't view Apple as a proprietary monoculture, and one that is somewhat worse in the sense that you can't clone the features of it without being sued (what if Reader had patents covering it and sued if you tried to create a clone?)
Apple frequently force upgrades users and develoeprs, some would say by planned obsolescence. For example, early on in IOS, people built apps that allowed in-app purchases and subscriptions, because Apple had no API for them, so we had a federated, open system for that feature. Then Apple changed their T&C and mandate use of Apple infrastructure to do this, and people now have to resort to hacks (remember Dropbox getting banned because of a link to sign up?) Slowly, the apps were forced onto Apple monoculture services.
Basically, when Apple introduces monoculture, it is viewed as a good. It simplifies user experience, etc. But for everyone else, it's somehow bad and evil.
Having said that, there's at least a practical difference in the kind of "monoculture" that the iOS App Store represents and the kind of monoculture that Google Reader represented: while Apple may change the terms, it's highly unlikely they'd ever make the App Store just go away. I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS rather than for a violation that they should have been aware of when they submitted it. There are some high-profile cases of stupid rejections, to be sure, but that's not the same thing.
And, it's at least worth noting that a major difference there is that Apple derives revenue from their services. Say what you will about them, but that's a pretty good incentive to not just take their ball and go home. Google Reader didn't bring in any revenue, and that's what ultimately doomed it. (as in beer) does work, but not indefinitely.
Well, at the very least, the removal gun has been pointed at a lot of commercial apps when Apple has decided to "re-interpret" the TOS.
For instance, it used to be standard practice to kick someone out to your website to buy an ebook (i.e. the appropriate alternative to IAP). Over the course of several months, it became a TOS violation.
Apps that required an external subscription used to include sign-up links on their login screen. Now they don't.
How many commercial apps were hit by the Apple's app store programming language restriction?
Or, if we're including the Mac App Store, how many apps and developers have left it over sandboxing?
Yes, Apple isn't likely to shut down their app store completely. But, whenever they want, they can (and might sometimes do) kill a part of it that you care about, for their own internal reasons.
Apple, with its $100 billion in cash couldn't afford a few resources to continue supporting perfectly working hardware? They essentially deprecated my $4000 computer, because some of the commercial software I used only shipped newer updates on Mountain Lion. (and before you trot out the 64-bit EFI/Graphics Driver excuse, keep in mind both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux can be installed on this old machine and take full advantage of it, including up-to-date drivers. Apple makes many times more profit than Microsoft, and yet can't fund appropriate support for their full line of HW)
Point being, I was a paying customer, and I still got ditched. Apparently, it is not enough to merely derive revenue, it has to be large amounts of revenue. Hence, Apple stiffs the "Pro" market. Google could have made money from Reader, but the reality was, too few people were using it even though it was free. Lesson: if you are a niche community, you can get screwed, Apple, Google, it doesn't matter.
And by the way, many apps were kicked out of the app store for having links in them which lead to a page where you could purchase something through the web browser.
The first guy responds, "I sold widgets for more than anyone else, and they jailed me for excessive profits."
The second guy responds, "I sold widgets at the same price as everyone else, and they jailed me for price collusion."
They ask him, "What'd you do?"
The entrepeneur responds, "I sold widgets for lower than anyone else, so they jailed me for predatory pricing!"
I might be paraphrasing the story wrong. It's a folk story amongst economists about the absurdity of antitrust regulation. I'm not sure who originated it.
If a product grows huge quickly, which almost always requires it to be free, it will probably be acquired for a lot of money. Free products that don’t grow quickly enough can usually die with an “acquihire”, which lets everyone save face and ensures that the investors get something out of the deal.
I think this way of thinking is the product of a very frothy market over the last few years. Now, I'm not one to scream series A crunch from the mountain tops, but it's unrealistic to think that thousands of these startups that "don't grow quickly enough" will be acquihired. In 2012 Google and Facebook combined to make 21 acquisitions. That doesn't put much of a dent in the number of failing startups. And with the Formspring shutdown announcement last week, it seems that even companies that have achieved impressive scale (30M users in since 2010) cannot rely on being bought.
People _are_ screaming it from mountain view
Formspring seems like a red herring to me; everything I heard about it in the real world (as a high-school teacher) was toxic. Of all the online bullying issues I had to deal with, more involved Formspring than even Facebook. The anonymous thing was a double-edged sword.
In the software world, free software products stay free even after they have become the dominant platform. The price is not artificially lowered to zero; at scale the cost of operating a free service is lower than the advertising revenue generated by it. This is actually the "natural" price for the product.
But, there is little that can be done about the tendency for monopolies to emerge within the web ecosystem, only to fail. If companies were to charge or advertise heavily from day one, it would effectively preclude any sort of viral, meteoric rise, because the overwhelming number of prospective users would turn their nose up at it. Most companies would never achieve widespread success. On the other hand, a lack of an organized business strategy leaves companies scrambling to devise revenue sources, as is happening with Facebook and their absurd gift card thing. Either one can try to make money and be relegated to obscurity, or one can become popular and end up exasperated at their inability to make money. There is very little opportunity to become both wildly successful and fiscally viable; that is why most companies fail.
As a user, I would prefer a lack of business model to a lack of a business: better to have an RSS reader (or social network, or mail client/to-do app) that lacks substancial income for 8 years than one with a direct business model that never gets off the ground.
Like the App Store?
People throw their content into these services, time and again. Often doing so as they're suffering whatever pain we hypothesize is implicit in leaving a prior service. (However much pain it did or did not cause, to have everyone's stuff locked up in a MySpace silo, it did not stop anyone from putting all their stuff right back into Facebook's silo.)
And they do this in other contexts: no-one much frets about proprietary saved-game file formats. Or the release of new console platforms that end support for entire libraries of games. So clearly there's a line.
And it seems a reasonable one to draw. Because who really cares about their old saved games, or a game they hadn't played, or mobile app they hadn't so much as launched, in months?
It's certainly nice as things approach the open/internet ideal. But there's clearly an entire class of computing where people do cost/benefit considerations with an emphasis on immediate entertainment value, rather than long-term computing value.
And people have repeatedly demonstrated a desire to treat social networks more like consoles than even mobile platforms, let alone PC computing platforms.
So why do geeks persist in seeing "A Problem" here? Let alone a problem that, if solved, would garner any attention for having presented a solution?
Yup. This guy did a fantastic job articulating what many others have just given up on trying to. Those of us who voice trepidation are usually marginalized as jealous and/or haters. See: http://xkcd.com/743/
The OP also seems to be unaware of TV, radio, etc.
/used to work for a business that had to compete with twilio.
Neither? If Google Reader was spun off as an independent company, how would it pay for the hosting and bandwidth costs?
what a crazy piece of logic.
google destroyed the market for smaller RSS-app vendors by providing a service for free, at a loss. was it on purpose? or just stupidity? what exactly does it change? the ecosystem around RSS has been ruined, maybe beyond repair.
because open and don't be evil and blah.
This is surely a joke, because the last time I checked software of my choosing can pluck RSS feeds and serve me content, whether it be a web, desktop, or mobile app. While the current quality of RSS apps can be argued, RSS is in no way near dead.
The predatory pricing thing is a problem for a lot of people. I've most recently come across it with a friend trying to start his graphic-design business who was upset about discovering that "99 designs" website. Before that it was a bass player for our band that was strenuously principled that we should never accept a gig "for exposure", and should also not play with musicians that had a history of accepting free gigs, since it was "disrespectful" to the players that were trying to make a living at it. While I do agree that there are moderating counterpoints to both, they do bring up relevant concerns.
Meanwhile, you have Radiohead and Nine-Inch-Nails, both of whom experimented with releasing their music for free way back when. When it "worked", everyone championed how it was the way forward for the music industry - how music was a "service", how the recordings should be loss-leader marketing expenses for the paid service of live performances. Overlooking the people who were more focused on the recording side of things, and the fact that those two bands had built-in fanbases. Years later, both bands are moving on from the "free" model, while so many people are misguidedly releasing their tracks for free that indie songwriters are paying money to even get their signed-up fans to listen to their new tracks.
I'm not so sure that the conclusion is that free works, as it is accepting that free works by being predatory and that there can be consequences that hurt others. And it isn't exactly ethical to accept a negative consequence on behalf of someone else. This is not to say that going free is wrong - sometimes there is a bigger picture that might make it worthwhile for all (for instance, many open source techs that have created new marketplaces that have enabled many people to make a living). But the argument does not reduce down to something as simple as free works, therefore free is good.
That was my thought. He opened by talking about Free, because Reader closing and Mailbox being acquired stirred up a lot of the usual anti-Free-Service backlash. And he discusses free, I think, just to underline that it does work.
But I think he went into the weeds (and clearly lost much of the readership there) in discussing why. Which is strange, as I don't think even the anti-Free crowd takes issue with whether Free works and they certainly seem to all understand that it does work.
And, ultimately, the "why" part is irrelevant to where he winds up, which is simply that open protocols should be preferred to proprietary ones.
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally: https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss). It might turn out that Reader shutting down is the best thing that could have happened.
Let's illegalize free blogs!
I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google. Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS. Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for it's millions of users.
It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.
My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm okay with investing time in adopting a free service.
However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves (probably a minority), they could do so with ease.
[1] http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-...
edit:
Every business that deals with some sort of digital goods today has to compete with free.. music, movies, games, etc. So maybe we should all just sit around and say how unfair it is rather than to figure out how to compete. Its a completely ridiculous argument
Everything can work, and everything has its advantages and flaws. You just need to know where you're, and have a strategy to succeed based on your business model.
Not free, acqui-hire, shut down.
Again, as a user paying for a service doesn't protect you from having it shut down.
RSS feeds are free in both beer and speech, and were likely authored (or co-authored) by Aaron Swartz to be that way. The Google Pluses of the world, not so much...