Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

All right, so I have a slight bone to pick with Marco. This is actually a fairly well-written article and I'm glad that people are engaging with it elsewhere in the comments, but I'm just a bit confused that he's choosing to write it now, and about Google Reader than about, say, Reading List. Remember? That product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Instapaper? Or iCloud, that product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Dropbox? Or Ping, that product that Apple released for free and then shitcanned after not enough people used it?

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

It sounds to me like you are imputing motives unsupported by this particular example.

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.

In general, it's pretty even-handed on this particular issue:

   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.

Second, it sounds complex because it _is_ complex. He's pretty explicitly addressing the "you're not the customer" canard, as if that's a panacea. In reality it is a trade-off, and paid vs. free is possibly even orthogonal, given the last paragraph.

I agree with orthogonal. I see it as a 2x2 grid: free($), paid vs open, closed.

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

paid/open: vulnerable to a race to the bottom as the open alternatives undercut each other on price

And that's bad for the customer how?

It might be good for the customer at first. In the long term, though, it's not difficult to imagine cheap -> free -> monoculture -> square one.

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.

I'm not sure how an open monoculture is square one. If it becomes less than ideal to anyone, they can just fork it. Plus, you can't really shut down an open "One True Product" if someone can just use the open materials to start it up again.

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.

This is more of a consequentialist argument, but Reading List didn't have the same ripple effects as Reader did.

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.

I agree with you in that I have a hunch Marco may be an Apple fanboi; still, as you said, it's a well written article, and one point in particular stands out to me: the fact that people are trying to kill RSS and leave the only options as proprietary-sell-your-personal-information ghettos that could be shut down at a moments notice, and much more effectively.

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.

Who's being forced to anything?

Apple had an RSS reader too, as part of Mail. They killed it and deleted everyone's data with no warning.

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