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Comment by YooLi | Hacker News Reader

This analogy would only work if Apple gave away the Mac Pro for free, everyone switched to it because it was free, and then Apple announced they needed all the Mac Pros back because they were done providing free Mac Pros.

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.

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My analogy was comparing the products themselves, not the surrounding techniques used by the companies that make them. My point is that Reader and Mac Pro are at their core very similar products: immensely useful for a small (nerdy) market niche, not capable of ever providing enough profits to warrant their upkeep in a corporation the size of Apple or Google.

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.

But Marco's point was that Reader dominated its niche in such a way that few alternatives exist. This is obviously not true of the Mac Pro. Google didn't simply kill off an unsuccessful product. They killed off an unsuccessful product that had a near-monopoly.

> few alternatives exist.

this is ridiculous the last few days on HN were filled with alternatives. Google allows you to export your feeds so nothing was lost.

Yes, and my point is twofold:

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.

Feedly got 500k users just a few days after Google announced Reader was going to be shutdown. That's 500k people who have a pulse on this type of thing. The actual RSS user total must be much higher, I guess we'll see how much higher when Reader actually shuts down. But whatever the number is, it's pretty clear that there are enough RSS users that a real business can be built on top of it, and indeed there were business built on top of it before Reader and I'm betting there will be real businesses built on top of it after Reader, but I find it really hard to look at what we know and not conclude that Reader had a profound impact in this space.

> 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.

Apple dominates the "Tower Computer that legally runs OS X" market.

That's not a market anymore than "RSS software that runs Google Reader" is a market.

Sure it is. If I want a desktop that runs OS X, what do I do? I buy one. Sure, it's a monopoly, but it's a product with a unique characteristic that people are willing to pay money for. Unfortunately, if Apple decides to drop the Mac Pro, it'll be a market that still exists but no one will be able to legally enter.

I don't think we disagree here. I explained that a "big market" is a relative term. To Google, the market is not large enough to justify keeping this thing around, especially in this context of "social networks" that people keep bringing up. The bigger the company, the harder it is to be considered "successful". This in no way means that it isn't a viable business for a smaller company. In fact, that's basically exactly what I said in my last sentence:

> 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.

Google forgot who the "small" number of users were. Reader is/was a power tool for many users. I was one that wouldn't mind paying some money for the time that Reader saved me. But now I have to consider that Google can kill any of the tools that I use for any reason. There are alternate choices in all Google "strengths". And many of us will switch to them.

But the Mac Pros people are using now don't cease to exist if/when Apple officially cans them. That makes them very disimilar products. You would have been better off comparing to Apple iWeb Hosting.

> My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it

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?

> 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.

A better solution would have been for Google to auction off the service. This would have allowed smaller companies to run it and impose a small fee. While it might not have made sense financially for Google to do this, it might make sense for a small company with a small staff focusing just on this product to make a go of it.

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