Reader didn't have a documented API, and the differences between it and this only begin there. Move on.
Google Translate? Google Search API?
>Move on.
Yes, let's just forget about all the stuff Google does that sucks and pretend it never happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anon1385
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anon1385
Carry on, I guess.
There has been a lot of Google news the last week, and loads of submissions on HN, so I've made quite a few posts on them. That is hardly comparable to having an account for a year or more but only ever posting in stories about a single corporation to defend that corporation.
I don't know why you linked my submissions, only 4 out of the last 30 of them, going back ~560 days were about Google or Google products.
His point is that things must never change?
Google Docs looks like it has a healthy future, but they very easily could decide they don't want the API out there. Particularly with Google's newfound lack of fear of pissing people off.
[1] https://developers.google.com/translate/
[2] http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-shopping-...
in the first case the developer is the user adopting the API, and enhancing his own service with it, without the end user noticing it.
With this new API the end users of the product will be people with google accounts which will be able to seamlessly interact with 3rd party products. This greatly benefits the company as a platform, which seems to be the recent focus (which led to unpopular unfortunate choices as dropping "leaf" products).
It's ok to criticize that choice etc, but that's another topic. I guess that if you want to build an application which leverages on the google's ecosystem, it's a reasonably safe bet it won't be dropped soon, as google has a immediate return from it (unlike translate API for instance).
Last weeks reshuffle which had the Maps and Commerce units absorbed into the Knowledge and Ads units respectively and Pichai taking over Android brings it down to 5 focus areas:
SVP of Knowledge/Search — Alan Eustace, SVP of Identity/Social — Vic Gundotra, SVP of Advertising and Commerce — Susan Wojcicki, SVP of YouTube/Video — Salar Kamangar, SVP of Android, Chrome and Google Apps — Sundar Pichai
The key distinction between Drive and Reader is that Drive is pretty much the embodiment of Google Apps itself, whereas Reader was an orphaned product which didn't have a home in any of these 5 post-Page areas.
Drive is now a pillar of Google's services, not just Apps but Google Now and search rely on data stored in it, and with many competing storage services around any differentiating feature is worth having.