Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
"And by the way – how is this app strategic for you guys and Reader is not? A little clarity would certainly be appreciated."
I too would love to know what Google is thinking here.
Combine that with what Google already knows (that I leave work at 5 and drive within half a mile of a grocery store), think about the intelligence they could bring to my Todo list.
(I know lots of people aren't going to like the privacy implications, my comment isn't meant to apologize or touch on that aspect)
What I find particularly interesting about it is the potential to produce genuinely relevant advertising. As a simple example, imagine I ask my smartphone where I can find the nearest fast food joint and it tells me there is a McDonald's around the corner. It might also serve an ad that says there is a Burger King one block further away and if I go there and show the ad I will get free fries and a drink with my sandwich.
There are some very interesting possibilities here that we have only begun to scratch the surface of.
Now if they could make this a social thing, where real, authenticated, non-paid people recommend a good place to eat or get my suit tailored, I would be on board. Sadly, there is no money in that sort of service, as Yelp found out pretty quickly.
For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying.
And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings.
I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.
Perhaps they just had to learn the lesson that spaghetti that sticks is probably best left in place when it has a rabid fan-base.
Taken from http://www.google.com/landing/now/
> Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.
Google Now extends the mission to include personal information. The plan is to eventually know what you want before you know you want it.
How could that be any more strategic?
And Google Drive better get rid of folders. Just have a box you drop files on. If you need them back, hopefully you can figure out a search term to find them. But not using any search operators, those are too much like letting you organize.
In itself, Reader could fit in (as the article by one of the original developers touched on). But for various reasons they never worked this out, or didn't put enough resources on it. So now they pull the plug. A stupid decision for many reasons, but not necessarily from a purely 'strategic' point of view.
One reason I can think of that they never invested deeply in Reader could be that the subset of people using it actively (geeks, information addicts) just wasn't interesting and broad enough to them.
The 'aha' moment for me was when I was visiting New York City: A few hours after my arrival, it told me that a favorite musician of mine was going to perform at a venue close to my location. I would have never known if I didn't have the service.
I'm guessing they knew I liked that artist because of my youtube history (my phone doesn't contain any music). That's cool with me. Oh and if they want to show me an ad for his latest album, instead of the latest One Direction single, I'm cool with that too.
Lots of cynicism/astroturfing towards Google. Maybe they were simply giving away their share of the pie to other, smaller businesses? It's not like there's a shortage of RSS readers out there; it's kind of a trivial thing to build.
I went to my phone, and did a Google spring cleanup yesterday, by deleting all the stuff I didn't use, and thought Google would see a future;
That is good for startups, they may attack Google product segments with ease, and we shall all PR for them and enjoy using them.
1. Release something that's compatible with another popular thing. 2. Build up a huge following. 3. Remove the compatibility. 4. ??? 5. Profit!
It's the same thing that happened with NT and OS/2 compatibility. I'm not sure if Excel can still deal with Lotus files, but Excel got popular because of its Lotus compatibility.
http://www.zdnet.com/google-drops-exchange-activesync-suppor...
Then when staying at the hotel, it knows I'm staying there and tells me when I'm driving elsewhere how far away I am from it with traffic and how to go back via a notification.
Other times, if you call a place, like to order carryout, it knows you called it by the telephone number and then gives you a notification of how far away that place is and offers directions.
On my HP Touchpad though, Jellybean runs like a charm. I think the real reason fragmentation was ever an issue is because so many devices shipped without enough space for apps.
It doesn't help of course that Google and their strategic app partners (see Facebook) assume that every device has a tonne of space (which modern devices do of course) and grow ridiculously big. Chrome and Currents are both unusably big on an older device.
Bit of a ramble, but in short you're getting a much much better experience by not upgrading, unless there's a way to hack that tiny storage partition?
While I can use Google Now on my Galaxy S III, apparently Google doesn't want me using it if I won't do things their way.
Reader.. not so much.
How so? Show me someone's blog subscriptions, and then metrics on entries they clicked on, how long they viewed it, and the clicks that they followed, and I could quickly get a very accurate profile of the person.
I suspect there will be a lot more than just todo lists, so the possibilities are really endless.
I was finally connected with a developer evangelist, and I sent an email saying something like "would love to know more about Google's strategic goals with Hangouts".
Her response was "I'm sure you're aware that Google doesn't discuss its strategies outside the company".
What a striking cultural difference from startups, where we're constantly discussing our strategies together.
Basically, Google is canceling the direct RSS blog subscriptions that countless blog readers have accumulated over the years. To be sure, it's a fairly low barrier for them to export and thus renew through another provider (be it Twitter or another RSS reader or Google Plus). But even though this seems to readers of Hacker News like a fairly low barrier, some casual or less tech-savvy readers will be left behind.
At least that's what I expect to happen to my blog, which is followed by a very non-technical audience -- the bulk of whom subscribe through some Google Reader-powered source.
Is the closing of Reader ideal? NO! But you have to know something like that might happen, plus they're giving enough time for people to migrate to other services and exporting your data couldn't be easier.
My question is what are you going to do? Go to other services for everything, never use a google product again in case it closes down? I'd argue that there is even a better chance of any other small dedicated startup to fall apart than google closing down their one of their product, if you wan't to be really sure something is "forever", self host, but don't lie to yourself, that's not even close to a perfect solution.
- Average items/day published by subscriptions - Number and percentage of items that you actually read - Number of items you actually clicked, per-subscription - Time of day items are posted / items are read - What subscriptions haven't updated in a long time?
You are right about it exporting starred content, by the way. None of this other data, however, is available for export.
The mistake here is thinking that google's 'free' services are free. I am letting you spy on me (gather metrics on what I read, what I've marked as important, what I've shared with others) in exchange for the use of your product.
That type of data should be worth 10x more to an advertising company than the 5 or 10 dollars a month than I would pay for each service.
The rest is news and updates I already saw on Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. This is with a few carefully curated circles. I culled a few people out for flooding me with uninteresting things, but G+ hasn't removed their posts from the stream. The rest are people who either don't post at all or don't post often.
I'm pretty sure it depends on who you follow, it only takes a minute to search for a couple of your interests and follow them but worth it
I am subscribed to 100+ RSS feeds that have no corollary in Google+ and likely never will.
And as Malik has raised the question in his post - what's in it for Google? No one seems to know this. They might just be testing one of their APIs by building this app.
Anyway, this app is clunky.
[1]Google Reader used to mean RSS the way Search means Google Search and this is very important.
People keep saying something like this without providing real examples. I can believe Reader's existence might have depressed the market for new feed readers (though there have long been competitors around--lots of open source and built in ones, and a few for-pay ones too, like Feedly), but I haven't been able to personally think of any feed readers that were crushed by Reader coming out.
I may just have forgotten them, though (2005 was a long time ago). Anyone have good examples?
Yeah, good point :-)
There was Bloglines. It is still there, only difference being - it's a ghost town now.
There used to be FeedDemon's own sync and now FeedDemon is jumping into the pyre with Reader.
It's been long and I am out of example. Maybe others will bring some.
But thing in this way - "because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products."[1]
Thing this way - what about an startup that wants to enter hosted mail(web mail too) and they won't because of GMail. The same can be said about IM(for personal use; not those dev chat apps), Forum(Groups?), blah. And Google has good reason to kill them too.
[1]http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/03/19/this-is-what-pisses-me...
Now, you'll have to trust me on these two statements:
1. I did learn "sth 'can' be used for something" from that old good little dictionary[1] and did not pick it from the Internet or SMS and it's a valid use. (Though, I see it also means South in US Eng)
2. That is probably the best dictionary I've come across, even better than OALD, I had them both and hardly ever used the latter (:-) ).
[1]http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/sth?q=sth - not Oxford link but just as good.
I've only ever seen South abbreviated as S, never as sth.
It's not just about the data: it's about the habits and familiarity surrounding the process of using the data.
In RSS, I've been using NetNewsWire for years, even though it's basically abandon-ware and has really fallen behind. Why do I keep using it? Because it works okay, and when I've tried to switch—most recently to DevonTHINK PRO—I've gone back to NetNewsWire.
I'd happily pay for a new version or for a better OS X desktop-only RSS app, but I'm a very small market.
If you're that upset about it, then what do you really want from the tech world? A world where no service is ever killed or changed in a way that makes it less useful to you? We wouldn't have all of the awesome stuff that we have now if thousands of companies weren't willing to kill or change stuff that was unprofitable and take a chance on something new. At least Google is being pretty nice about it - we have months of notice and easy ways to get our feed lists out of Reader. They could have just up and pulled the plug without telling anyone or giving anyone a chance to get data out. Lots of services have been killed in just that way before.
Personally, I'm waiting a few weeks for all of the other services to settle down and get used to the massive traffic influx. After that, I expect I'll find something better than Reader and get used to that. And then that will be killed someday too, and I'll have to find yet another thing. Life goes on.
For example - I use Evernote for tracking meetings, and I use Omnifocus for personal task tracking. It took me 6-10 hours to learn the ins and outs of each of those tools - and I'm pretty happy with the way they work for me. More importantly, I'm reasonably certain that both of those tools/services will be around several years from now, so I can continue to use them, track my tasks, without having to pick up a new tool.
This concept of tool persistence is really important and valuable for a certain segment of the population - and I think it's what Om is expressing here. He doesn't really trust that Google will persist their attention to "Keep", because they've started shutting down other popular services after a few years, so what's to prevent them from doing the same thing with "Keep". He'll stick with evernote, and I can understand why. It's really an attempt to make it clear why Evernote should be successful in the face of an attack by Google.
No thanks, Google.
There were plenty of other notebooks on the internet that actually had more features that worked better, a lot of them had methods to import from Google Notebook as well. Notebook was fading with Google Docs gaining steam (and I know they both had different feature sets).
They did keep Google Notebook running for a fairly significant time before they finally closed the doors and migrated the data to Drive.
The camps of opinion I've seen on how Google should behave:
1) Pundits: Support an increasingly burdensome array of fringe services which cost them more than they gain (in their opinion)
2) HN: Reduce their experimental forays and leave (for now) private/small companies to their niches.
3) Coders: open source the services when shuttering.
1 and 2 would seem anathema to Google - the next Facebook could be hiding in either the organizational lethargy created by the former or the failure to act on the latter.
3 is going to be prohibitively expensive or difficult depending on how the service was built.
I'm just not sure there's anything other than a lot of sound and fury in the future of these discussions, which makes them boring.
As a user of Google Reader since too long ago to remember, I'm annoyed that I have to find an alternative but it also shouldn't be sparking a discussion about high-level, long-term Google strategy.
[0]: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/17/google-reader/
Open sourcing it sounds great, but folks are saying that with zero knowledge of what the service actually looks like under the hood. I can only think they're assuming it looks like a common web service stack like LAMP or rails or something that would actually make sense to anyone if they got the code.
I also agree that Google is becoming like Microsoft, trying everything.
I'm going to stay with companies like Evernote.
There may be no feature complete alternatives, but there sure are a lot of email readers out there if you had to move off of it.
Addendum: The way I read that form, they will only consider whitelisting apps if the developers ask for it. As a user, I'm still screwed.
Even Windows Phone 8 has that confirmed: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/15/google-caldav-support-sti...
In any case, if they're committed to preserving this feature then why are they implementing screening?
Seems unlikely they'll drop it given their approach to iOS so far has been to infiltrate the ecosystem with their own Google apps, though never say never I suppose.
As for why they're pushing people towards their own Calendar API, presumably so they can add/promote new features specific to Calendar which aren't present in CalDav. They can get more usage of Calendar-specific APIS/Features by pushing devs towards their own version, instead of letting them default to the CalDav API because that's what they're familiar with.
The responses gathered from API request form also act as a feedback mechanism for their own Calendar API, which they can use to fix any deficiencies.
Thanks for sharing. What a confusing mess!
Yes, and syncing Calendar data with Apple's calendar App is not this strategy.
Releasing a standalone "Calendar" app for iOS to keep it accessible, controlled, and branded on iOS devices after it stops working and Apple doesn't bother to request whitelisting but promotes iCloud instead, is.
Google breaking off into their own Calendar app is a possibility, but its not clear cut that they would do this since there's a definite "stickiness" to having the Calendar sync option pre-checked as soon as the user adds his/her GMail account.
One would hope Google has enough sense just to keep this working with no hiccups for Apple, but it also is not clear cut that they will from the information we've been given. (Or that Apple gives a shit either way)
It's not like they are seeking feedback on how to improve CalDAV, they're moving away from it.
See also http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US//windows-8/use-google-win... :
I want to connect my Google account after January 30, 2013
Here's what you need to know:
Unfortunately, with Google changing the way it supports EAS,
your Google calendar can’t sync with the Calendar app.CalDAV is the standard and it's pretty clear that Google is backing away from that along with ActiveSync for enterprises and therefore silo-ing Calendar.
A search brought up the main support page which says its upcoming (Under "OS and Microsoft Outlook® requirements"): http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&hlrm=...
It also brought up a Google groups thread where a Google representative posted last month saying they're working on it: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/rUd8phVXs...
Also why would Apple have to request addition to the Google Calendar CalDav whitelist on iOS? Google could just whitelist it themselves since its them who decides whether or not it continues server-side.
From the original December announcement that's since been extended, amended, and clarified. And from the fact that at present, it still doesn't work.
Both of your links are relatively new developments. I'm glad to see that this is happening.
I've already spoken to why Apple would have to request whitelisting. The way Google announced plans to phase out CalDAV indicated such. Not for Apple expressly, but for anyone using CalDAV.
I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but none of this seems like simple "housekeeping" It seems like "platforming" or "silo-ing" Calendar in an analogous way to what Twitter did/is doing with its API and 3rd party clients. I readily admit this makes little sense for Calendar, but phasing out support for the most popular sync protocols used to by the 2 most popular software platforms -one of which is the open standard, then allowing them by exception only, is suspect.
This is like if you went to the supermarket every day to buy milk, flour, sugar, beans, and lettuce. And then the supermarket realises that it is uneconomical for them to provide lettuce, so they drop it, but they do start selling eggs. And you look at those eggs and say 'Yeah, Right. I'm not going to buy those. I remember what happened to the lettuce.'
I think this explains why Reader was killed... It competes with G+. Want updates from your favorite website? Follow them on G+.
It's a turn away from open formats and interoperability.
It hasn't really changed that much, but jesus, my perception has. Charging for Google Maps was a warning sign, though it only really applied to companies, fair game. Wave was flippant, it came and went too fast to understand the gesture. Google Notes always needed some love and attention it was never going to get.
But Google Reader? It was/is uniquely useful. Widely supported, widely loved, widely used (as far as I can tell). It was the kind of thing that made me feel Google had your best interests at heart, I can't imagine it made them much money.
Just to clarify, I'm not upset about Google Reader, far from it http://theoldreader.com/ looks entirely capable of picking up the slack. It's just upsetting to see a company that I really thought was different is just a company with margins and directives and the rest. I guess I'm an idiot.
I used notes extensively, and one day... You know the drill.
Good luck to those who will jump on Keep. After notebook, I switched to MacJournal, it works great for me, and I am not thinking of switching to an online alternative. There are other tools that are better suited for keeping stuff, such as DevonThink (check Macupdate Promo).
At some point, when you have a ton of resources and people are shipping products out the wazoo.....you have to kill products. When you kill products, you lose confidence for future product announcements and skew your engagement numbers.
What is a company like Google to do, when their larger products command most of their resources?
G+ is a failure, as was wave and so many others from google stable. But G+ is important to this one guy, he is willing to sacrifice everything for this one.
The difference is that the occasional content on FB is utterly lost between tons of "apps" and ads, to the point that I can count the amount of times I visited FB in 2012 on fingers.
FB's last "pro" is Messenger... which I use actually to talk to only one person.
They discontinued Reader and added a new feature to Drive. Get over it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
For real security of data and use: either
1. Download and install with local storage only
2. whatever service you do use, save all the things locally frequently, in multiple open data formats.
Super bad timing, the product is tainted with negativity already, if they'd given it even a fortnight to die off it'd be a much better play.
Keep, unlike Reader, is a paid service. A big point of Keep is to encourage people to use Drive - a storage service you pay for, once you fill up your introductory tier (keeping audio notes might help with that).
EDIT: Looks like it both transcribes and keeps the audio available. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57575465-285/get-started...
Now, would it be nice to have all of that under one company? Sure, but there are too many privacy issues when doing so under Google.
Because, you know, they are from the same company responsbile for the demise of Google Reader, and the less you get DEPENDENT on them, the least you will suffer from the demise of another product as this.
Or you can move on.
In terms of usefulness, Reader, as an information sieve, is a tool that saved me hours a week. If Google had offered a paid version to keep Reader going instead of shutting Reader down, I would have paid. Now I don't trust any "free" service they offer to be there in the long term. I guess Google "free" isn't "free". Explains why both OSS and commercial software(with long term agreements) are better choices.
I don't normally comment much, and when I do I try not to be negative. One thing I discovered in the last few days is that I have absolutely no patience for whining, especially when coming from grown man. This post, and a lot of comments around here sound like whining to me. These are my feelings regarding the recent Google Reader news and the comments surrounding it..
I want to be clear, I know why people are pissed off, some are angry because their beloved product was taken away, and for some, their trust was broken, perhaps more than once. It has certainly struck a nerve, and I want to have these conversations, but something about the tone of the people has really turned me off.
</end of whine>
Reason I ask: Google scrapped Notebook (http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html) a while back, and has now released Google Keep. To me, this is a tear down and rebranding. I can't speak to the reason of it, but I would guess Google Keep already has more users than Notebook did. I can't speak for Google, but I certainly know their goal is not to lose 500k users to Feedly. My guess being, they likely want to take the smoothest, but also cheapest, way out of a product that they can no longer maintain.
At the end of the day it is not about Google or Microsoft or Evernote, but about not losing data You created.
I'm sure people worked on it but in the grand scheme of things it was a drop in the bucket.
except these good will and hearts from various people who complained won't be paying any money to google (at least, for this particular product).
But listen to me when I tell you how to run your service that costs money.
Riiiiigghhhttt.
Google did more harm to RSS technology by letting it deteriorate over years. Now that it's gone, I am very hopeful that RSS will evolve and deliver content in better and new ways.
It is a rude awakening when it happens, but it should hardly be surprising for anyone that has been around for a while.
But who knows?
Amazon? Nope, don't see them stepping up to defend the Open Web.
Facebook? Hell no.
LinkedIn? No.
Sun? Maybe if they hadn't been acquired by Oracle.
IBM? Maybe not totally ridiculous, but history doesn't paint the best picture of IBM in this regard. And they also don't really offer services over the web, like a search engine. Maybe they could scale Watson up to webscale and make that the new Google?
Wolfram? No.
DuckDuckGo? Right spirit, but I don't think they are influential enough.
Opera? Not influential enough.
Canonical? No.
Novell? Eh, no.
HP? No.
This isn't looking too promising.... :-(
Edit: Duh, I missed a big one! The Wikimedia Foundation! They are probably one of the strongest backers of the Open Web, and definitely have a little bit of influence, thanks to WIkipedia and related projects.
Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped.
They are well positioned for becoming the filesystem of the web, and may have some interest in defending open file formats and protocols.
Well, perhaps this is a market opportunity. Many people need products that embrace the OpenWeb.
Google was a good champion. But Google is an advertising company after all, and their primary business is to spy on your datastream in order to sell your attention to advertisers.
So now that Google seems to be abandoning the OpenWeb, perhaps this will create a void that can be filled by others...
However, I wouldn't dismiss Microsoft so quickly. They're a serious problem on many fronts and will probably switch sides once this battle is done, but they have plenty of reasons to oppose a WebKit monoculture, at least. When you don't have many allies, you take what you can get.
I came of age as an active Slashdot reader. At that time Microsoft was seen as an arch villain that could do nothing but evil. Curiously, today Google has a far deeper and more chilling degree of influence far beyond what Microsoft had. Microsoft had a monopoly on an open platform, Google knows everything public about you, a lot of private stuff too, possibly can run facial recognition of you against every picture on the internet, and wants to also be able to predict what you are about to do. And they have a monopoly on online advertising. Unelected regulators and elected representatives are terrified of Google. Google has gotten a blank slate pretty much to do what they want, perhaps from a national security standpoint alone.
Google today, makes the Microsoft of yesterday look like a used child's toy.
I see the attitude toward any dominant government or corporation as a pretty good thermostat toward a group's value of freedom and openness, and quite frankly the free pass Google gets here (relative to Microsoft in 1998) is disturbing.
I actually think Yahoo could be a bit of a dark horse here, but it's hard to guess where Marissa Mayer's head is at in this regard. Yahoo have actually done some cool stuff, in terms of Open Standards and Open Source. They were early with embracing RDFa and Microformats, for example, and some cool OSS code has come from Yahoo, including, IIRC, Hadoop. But obviously a lot has changed at Yahoo since then, so I dunno what to think about them right now.
That's a childish opinion. A grown up would see how Microsoft is constantly threatening with a nuclear patents war, sliding in that pool of companies that can't innovate any more and so they turn to litigation.
If anything I'm seeing signals that Microsoft is turning into a patents troll.
The wishful thinking on Microsoft turning into a beam of openness would be laughable, if it wouldn't highlight the tragedy of human nature (we are so stupid sometimes).
I agree with you completely with regards to privacy and all the information that Google has about users. However, the difference is that Microsoft of yesterday had a stranglehold on users' choice. It was really hard to be productive by NOT using windows operating system and the whole ecosystem that came with it.
Today you don't want Google search? Use Bing or ddg. Gmail? There are countless other free webmail providers. Google+? You have Facebook, Twitter and so on. Youtube? DailyMotion, Metacafe, etc. Android phones? You have iOS, WP8 devices.
While Google really is very powerful, one still has good alternatives.
Apple isn't perfect and is not an exemplar of a libre philosophy. Their most strategic stuff is pretty much all closed. But they have embraced a lot more openness than people give them credit. With Google moving everything into their own APIs it might not be long before Apple is more open than Google.
Apparently Google's even made their own proprietary zigbee competitor for Android@home. Whyyyyyyyyy.
Here are the differences between Reader and Keep: Reader was an abandoned and an unclaimed product, kept on life support. Keep is a feature of Drive, a product which actually is acknowledged to be under someone's management
I hope Evernote will exist as it is now forever and that the author won't have eat his words someday.
I think you have missed previous discussions about the irreplaceable parts of Google Reader. Hints: going back in time for articles that are not present in the current feed, autotranslation of posts.
Apart from that, it's about Google's departure from "we do what's best for users" to "we will keep only a few things around and kill others even if you use them daily".
Personally, I never used Reader that much. Instead, I went for Feedly which used Reader as back end and Feedly is going to transition smoothly, so I am not affected. And even if they allow exporting, how long is it before they start killing other features/apps that I use? That's my(and others') concern here.
Re:Microsoft, they are the favorite scapegoat for tech press. Apple, Google and everyone else is becoming next MS. ;)
Unfortunately for Google, no one is responsible for closing Reader, thus no one will step up to the plate and fix this PR disaster.
There is a clear path to fix this mess, and I guarantee no one at Google has the humility to fix the problem.
If the Google reader closing is mentioned in new Google product announcements a month from now, will you admit this was a PR disaster? How about a year from now?
Google needs to grovel to get their hands around this. By admitting mistake, they can actually redirect the message to something positive.
BTW, I agree with you completely. It is trivial for me to switch services, and I am tired of hearing about it. That being said, Google is eating its own shit sandwich. Google has no one to blame but themselves.
The problem is that journalists tend to follow their leader, and this was written by Om himself. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet you will be proven wrong.
I get it, they need to get rid of old stuff. It just feels like a new way of doing that. People stick to windows because stuff keeps working, even if MS would rather it dies. People avoid OSX, because stuff stops working with new versions of the OS. There's nothing wrong with people abandoning google forever over little things.
Frankly, I'd be super sad if i had to leave gmail, i've used it for almost 9 years, and i really love it. But, will gmail be around in 5 years? 10? For almost a decade, i was utterly convinced gmail would live forever. I'm not so sure now. What happens when google wants us to all move to NewSocialNowWaveBuzzPlus thing, and puts gmail on life support to encourage that? Is it likely? no, of course not. Is it within the realm of possibility? Yes.
And the point is, if Google is "going social" and streamlining everything to Google+, why did this product even get released? Why isn't it just some new social storage feature on Google+?
The reality is that Google is the new "Old Yahoo". New product come out with a big fanfare, some techies get excited for a month, and then 2 years later it gets unplugged for some "bold new direction."
The point is, every product costs a user something. If not money, then at least their time and energy learning to use the product. When a user comes to rely on that product and it gets deleted (especially when the company is making money like crazy), users lose faith in the company.
Wow, this is the first time I've seen anyone put it that way, and it's completely true. I remember trying to rally around Yahoo Briefcase. Then Yahoo Photos. Then Yahoo 360. Or how about Microsoft?
But I guess it just comes back to companies being growth-oriented. If a service is launched, is not the company's core business, then stops growing, it's on the chopping block immediately. So ultimately it's much, much better as a user to go with a company that's dedicated to that task and lives and dies by it.
Viva Dropbox, Box, Evernote, etc..
Google dropping Reader has potential impact more like Yahoo!'s debacle with the Delicious relaunch. That change was so drastic that it was effectively a data-loss event for most users, obliterating years of carefully curated data. As Om points out, such actions are very destructive of brand trust. That's a risky position for any online services company to voluntarily put itself in.
FWIW, Evernote has removed significant features (esp. regarding Skitch) and gotten quite a bit of heat over it.
It seems like Google has given ample time and accessibility for its users and developers to adapt.
> It seems like Google has given ample time and accessibility for its users and developers to adapt.
I agree. But Reader has a significant online community around it. The friction and uncertainty created by Google's decision is bound to find an outlet.