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?
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.
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".
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?
> 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.
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."
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.