Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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