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Comment by hmsimha | Hacker News Reader

I posted this when it was pulled a couple days ago, to no traction :/

Google says their mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' To me (and several others who have posted in that forum), this seems to be counterintuitive to that mission. Many people can't afford or don't want to pay for a smartphone or the data plan. When you try using SMS search now, google responds "SMS search has been shutdown. You can continue to search the web at google.com on any device". This isn't exactly helpful for someone lost in an unfamiliar city without a smartphone or GPS.

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Sure, it isn't helpful for those without a data plan, but decisions doesn't exist in a present day vacuum. People with phones without data plans are a dying breed, and I think any reasonable person would focus their efforts on the premise that the world is moving toward smartphones.

I wouldn't exactly refer to them as a "dying breed" quite yet. I recall seeing a statistic somewhere that in many developing countries, SMS adoption rates are still going up. There's still a prominent market for SMS search, just not necessarily the one that Google wants to serve.

I'd like to know what you're basing this on. In the U.S. this may very well be true, though the fact still remains that lower-income people are less likely to have smartphones. But what about in developing nations?

Plenty of stats around. The trend is fairly clear. Mobile data is the future and almost the present, even in developing countries: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile...

On the google products forum, someone mentioned that in India, everyone was using this service because it's fairly uncommon to have a data plan. The study you just linked seems to show monthly 3G access at about 8% for urban India. Which seems like a pretty clearcut minority to me.

It isn't about the present numbers, it is about where the numbers are going. Google may have a mission statement of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", but clearly that require a company to make decisions. A lot of people would find it useful to have Google physically mail them info, but that isn't efficient or the way of the future.

I suspect a lot of people who are lamenting the "loss" of this service haven't used it. I have. It is better than nothing, but it is a hack designed for a world that isn't going to be around for long. If I was a Google shareholder, I'd be questioning them wasting any resources on it.

Whether or not that is the trend, it still sucks for the people who used it daily, such as myself. Your reasoning is sound, but that doesn't mean those of us who used it shouldn't be upset, or that those who no have need for it and possibly didn't even know about it until now shouldn't agree that it sounded useful.

I'm not trying to say google owes it to us to keep the service running or anything like that. They're a business and it's their prerogative to make decisions like this. I'm reminded of a Wayne Gretsky quote though, roughly "I don't skate to where the puck is, but where it's going to be." And that's solid reasoning. But from my perspective, with a team as strong as Google's, it wouldn't hurt them to leave a player where the puck is either.

In developing countries where smartphones are less common, Google offers Free Zone:

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/landing/freezone/stp...

Android works perfectly well without a data plan. I have none because I'm usually on WiFi and when I'm not, any McDonalds or Starbucks will work. I've occasionally thought of getting one, but last time I shopped for it, I couldn't find one at a reasonable price given low usage.

But then, I've never used search by SMS. Finding WiFi makes more sense.

Google says their mission is one thing; their actions seem to point to another. Actions speak louder than words.

I just wanted to add that, to me, this is a more egregious shutdown than reader. While many on Hacker News (who I'm assuming are more likely to have a smartphone than the average working-class citizen) may not understand this, envision this:

You are in an unfamiliar city, attempting to follow directions someone gave you that you scribbled down. You take a wrong turn and wind up in a rough-looking neighborhood at 2 AM. Most of your friends are asleep. What do you do?

This has happened to me, and I counted myself lucky to be able to text google for directions. While this may not be an extremely common scenario, there is the possibiilty that access to google's sms search may have saved someone's life.

If this service consumes resources, it kills people in some way or another too. Potential, largely unquantified, outliers aren't a good thing on which to base strategy.

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