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This isn't regression: it's progress. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing.

There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth' of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or unsuitable to break through to a wider market.

Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of "alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.

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Were they really not worth doing? Or just not worth Google doing? The latter has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print money.

I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.

I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that reduces the number of delivered ads?

Ding ding!

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.

I think you're right, but I think it also shows that the service will always be niche. That's fine, but it's not "regression".

You've hit the nail squarely on the head...

So, "good" isn't enough, sure. But how do you define what is enough? What's "good" for someone else - the ones who matter, I guess?

The problem is that we've gotten used to the idea that on the internet, the good of someone else doesn't have to interfere with our own good. Two tools, or two thousand, can live in, if not harmony, than in safely compartmentalized areas where their unloved niche can live in peace.

That used be what we called progress - that was using the strength of the net to create a productively pluralistic online world.

I think your definitions of progress and good are not accurate, or concrete. But I could be misunderstanding you.

Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing.

If you reduce everything down to commercial viability, then art isn't worth doing, music isn't worth doing, healing the impoverished isn't worth doing and frankly your comment wasn't worth typing, if you come right down to it, was it?

Art isn't created on a commercial scale by big corporate entities for exactly that reason unless it drives some other corporate interest (i.e. advertising, graphic design etc.). There is a subset of people who would continue to write code for themselves given no financial compensation, because they enjoy writing code. Similarly, there are people who create art purely for the joy of making art. Much as Google abandoned Reader and Alerts, don't expect Exxon to make an entry to the Turner prize.

Music has a large corporate aspect, but then a lot of music is done as art for the love of creation or the love of playing.

Healing the impoverished, for many people, is part of ones responsibilities as a human being. Everyone has the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", right? A lot of people consider health to fall under life and therefore much like the maintainance of civil liberties (wouldn't it be so much more profitable if you could own your staff?) it shouldn't be left to the whims of the market.[1]

[1] I'm a) british and b) practically a communist so your mileage may vary on that one.

Ah, so Alerts and Reader is like healing the impoverished. Clearly, I'm against all those things too!

Nice strawman there.

Google is a company, and if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up".

I have no idea what you're against. I don't care what you're against.

If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing." Is this not clear?

...if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up".

It is not.

One of the reasons Google gave for not opening up the source of reader was that it was too closely tied to their web indexing infrastructure. In other words, Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world.

In other words, the replacements for Reader will assuredly be inferior. But that's "progress," you say.

If everything that happens is "progress" then we're living in the best of all possible worlds, right?

First you say:

> If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing."

And then:

> Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world.

In other words: the company that was uniquely positioned to make the best RSS reader, found that it wasn't worth doing. So, yeah, I'm going to call it. The idea, which seems good, is fundamentally flawed.

Progress is not "just keeping doing what we've been doing for a while because some people feel pretty strongly that we should keep doing it". Progress is recognizing the failures, culling off the dead flesh and seeing what grows in it's place.

Time for the next thing.

In other words: the company that was uniquely positioned to make the best RSS reader, found that it wasn't worth doing.

They decided it wasn't profitable, which you insist makes it "not worth doing." I find that equation offensive, and you have responded to that criticism with mockery and no substance.

Progress is recognizing the failures, culling off the dead flesh and seeing what grows in it's place.

Creative destruction happens when something marvelous and new replaces something old, but simply destroying the old thing is never progress. Too many in the tech field seem to think that all destruction is "creative destruction," that all change is necessarily "progress."

You're looking for slights when there are none.

At the end of the day a product needs to be sustainable. That's just reality, and it applies to music and art as much as it applies to an online service. Sorry, but being offended about it doesn't mean anything.

"Worth doing" in a strictly commercial sense, perhaps, but part of what traditionally made the internet awesome was that it wasn't all about commerce.

That's why I liked Siegler's analogy to bees.

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