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"Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses."

You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to.

Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)?

If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high.

Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps.

All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.

It'd be manageable if Reader was the only small project they kept going, but not if there are dozens of them, and there have been dozens of them. Reader is only one example among many small projects which Google has been shutting down.

Some might protest that Reader should be the exception, but Google is the only one with the numbers, and I do believe Reader's popularity has been amplified by the nature of its loyal users. It's unlikely a complaint from a disgruntled SketchUp user is going to the top of HN.

"Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now"

Most of my non-technical family and friends haven't even heard of Reader and aren't aware of its shutdown. OTOH If Reader had some security leak that caused people's GMails to be read, they'd certainly hear about it and Google's seniors would be hauled into Congress or the EU to explain themselves.

At risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I don't believe Google has lost its way when you look at their performance over the past couple of years. If stock price is any indication, the all-time high (at a time when its rivals have been flat or in decline) suggests the market doesn't feel that way either.

The great thing about hypotheticals is we can make them without a basis in reality. Your hypothetical regarding some Gmail leak is not really reasonable.

The fact is, many many Google services don't make money in and of themselves. But they add value to the broader ecosystem as a whole.

Whether Google wanted to shut their service down is their business, but the weird machinations that have been trotted out to justify (senior management time, legal and technical risk, reputational risk) are really bizarre when taken within the broader context of how Google does and should operate.

It's not hypothetical. It's a real risk. You know, like a possible outcome has a certain estimated probability of occurring.

Risk analysis is one of the things companies do when they make decisions.

No-one is justifying here. This is just a conjecture about why it's in their interest to shut it down, contrary to impassioned arguments about how much money they could make to keep it. It's not a "justification" because no moral dimension has been mentioned here.

Google is a massive global corporation, it is accountable to its shareholders, no-one else. 37Signal/stripe/github are all small "boutique" companies (Try asking your Mom/some guy from High school what github is) who are privately held. If Google doesn't have checks and balances (management oversight and responsibility), it would fail an audit and the financial regulators would start knocking at the door.

I'd like to know how you would explain to shareholders that you are spending thousands upon thousands of pounds running a service which generates no revenue and doesn't encourage use of its other products ("anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps." hence no ad revenue or cross selling). It's nice if companies can do this but they aren't charities, this was a piece of charity google had to let go... and now we have a beautiful ecosystem of RSS clients with innovation and variety, I can't remember the last time I saw a monopoly was crushed of the companies choice and a tonne of little grass roots were seeded.

wat...where were the 'audit and financial regulators' when Microsoft was spending $700m a quarter on Bing?

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-throwing-money-down...

Larry and Sergey are the shareholders. They want to spend millions on self-driving cars, no one questions it. No one was questioning whatever tiny amount they were spending on Reader.

My problem with Google isn't that they behave like a business because they are. My problem is that they keep feeding us all this BS about being open and about doing it for our own good.

> All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it.

As someone who never used Google Reader and therefore doesn't really care either way about it, I can live with that, because the article raises points that strike me as generally true, and are discussed to rarely for my taste.

> Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier

You said this about Google Reader, but I'd like to take it out of context and go on a tangent (because when all you have is an off-road bike, everything looks like a ramp :D)

I don't think anyone denies that literacy is really important, some would call it a human right, or at least something deriving from human rights. But what would constitute "literacy in the information age"? Or maybe even "just" "web literacy"?

Being able to sign up to Facebook? Being able to write HTML and CSS? Being able to code a little, enough to be able to discern cool projects from total charlatans? Being able to code well enough to do anything they could possibly want their computer to do, and to contribute to the pool from which they took in however small ways?

I don't know where to exactly draw the line, but I am positive that signing up for Facebook is not enough (regardless of what Facebook might tell people, duh). It's easy, but it leads nowhere, or not very far. It is akin to having someone read and write for you, instead of ever learning it. Perfectly acceptable in the short run, when there is no other choice, but pathetic, a complete no-no, in the long run.

Our society would be even more of a cold, dark cellar without widespread literacy. Not that everyone reads, but most people at least could if they wanted to, sometimes they do when it's necessary, and that helps. With that in mind, I worry about how naively we treat this brave new computerized world.

There is this quote that predates the web but which the web constantly makes me think of, and which I believe goes hand in hand with another one:

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker (14 May 1960)

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." -- George Orwell

Yes, not being able to think is easier. I know, I've been there. But only in the short run, in the long run it makes everything impossibly hard.

The web as we know it, isn't even two decades old, and we already act all wise about it, that "that's just how it is". Yet we didn't give up on literacy for hundreds of years, if not millenia. If anyone today suggested that hey, wouldn't it be kinda okay if most people couldn't read, as long as the others made sure they select the best books to read to them from...? they'd be laughed out of any group of people. Most people on the planet older than 10 would see through that. It took us so long to get here, but damnit, here we are.

I don't see how computers are different, other than currently being mostly pushed and therefore being held hostage by motives of greed, consumerism and distraction, and our own shallow desire for instant gratification. But those motives are like clouds in the wind, in the way they are manifested they're rather a zit that grew in an unclean spot, than a "law of nature"... while computation and communication are hard facts that will not go anywhere ever, until the very end of the universe, or at least the end of life in it.

Whoever obstructed literacy in history is now dust and their motives forgotten, whatever temporary advantage over others it gained them they lost - but literacy remains, and the gratitude to those who teached others with patience and creativity will never waver or diminish. Again, I don't see how computers are different. Not everybody is Shakespeare, and not everybody has to be Carmack, but that doesn't mean to just leave it to the "experts".

Kicking out the ladder under you and being the middleman for what you found in the tree is a game old as dirt, and I think one nice step to help improving the physical world would be to stop repeating its worst mistakes in the "virtual" one.

/end rant.. no, wait:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein

I would upvote this comment more if I could. I think the analogy with literacy is absolutely spot on.

I'm as big a fan of literacy as the rest, but killing Google Reader doesn't spot people from writing blogs, or others with RSS readers from consuming them. I sometimes feel like I'm the only person on Earth who's never used that product. I use a desktop reader, have done so for years.

Maybe when my phone gets enough bandwidth and screen size to make RSS useful I'd care more about that but even so, I can switch to a different alt. at that time if needed.

The parent to my post wasn't just talking about Reader, nor was I. I was referring to the more general point that there are two competing models out there of how the web should work, the walled garden and the open network. Sure, killing Reader doesn't stop people from blogging, but that's not really what this is about.

Google has made it obvious, not just by killing Reader but by many of its recent actions, that it has switched sides from the open network to the walled garden. And the mindset of the walled garden does stop people from blogging (because they're too busy clicking "Like" buttons) or consuming RSS feeds (or any other information channel that doesn't appear in their walled garden).

Personally, I'm with you--I own my own domain name, host my own blog, have my own email that's independent of Google or anyone else, etc. If I want to consume someone's RSS feed, I can just do it; I don't need a walled garden to do it for me. But you and I are outliers.

Upvotes, nah; thank you for reading it, seriously.

I wish I could dig it up again, but ages ago I listened to an interview with Weizenbaum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum )... he said computers, technology in general, just like everything, can be used to empower people, or to disenfranchise/control them.

In some ways, things like Facebook make people "experiment with publishing" that might not have before, so that's cool... but it shouldn't end there. Just like "organizing the world's information" is not Google's task. If Facebook's and Google's goal was to make themselves obsolete, I'd be all for it.

But it's not, and like with many others, "innovation" is often enough just the excuse to be the middleman. I personally don't need those inventions. Sometimes flowers grow on a dung heap, but most of it is really dung... and flowers can grow perfectly fine on meadows, too.

Which is hilarious, because Weizenbaum is basically the 70s and 80s version of Dave Winer without the RSS under his belt.

Should this same approach to literacy also be applied to the machines we drive around every day?

I'm honestly curious. Because while I'm a hacker and know how to do many things with my computer, I'm literate because I fell in love with the machine as a child.

But I spend at least an hour a day commuting in my deathbox, and all I know is how to change gears, start/stop, and (more hp + lower weight = faster).

If you're stalled in the middle lane because you didn't ever check your oil and are backing up traffic, then yes.

And while more hp + lower weight = faster, more hp = faster and lower weight = faster, generally. Ceteris paribus, The ratio of hp and weight is the fasterfication factor.

To a novice, a car is about driving. After you learn more about cars, a car is still about driving. You're still doing the same basic things -- your extra knowledge doesn't give you much more power.

On the other hand, to a novice, a computer is about browsing the web, playing games, sending email, and so on. But after you learn more about computers, you can do so many more things. Extra knowledge gives you a lot of extra power.

> Should this same approach to literacy also be applied to the machines we drive around every day?

Yes, and it is. You can drive your car anywhere you want.

But it's so hard to hard to pick where to go, it's much simpler to pick from a simple list of places. Our car only drives you to the top 20 most important locations of your town, we find that our customers don't want to go anywhere else. We are sunsetting your ability to drive to unimportant places.

"So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running."

Glass is following the same route. With the delay of the GDK, Glassware is the current development route. It is just a REST protocol on a limited 1,000 requests per day. I imagine the GDK will not surface until they are satisfied with the results from the audience.

> Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, ...

Yes, they did try open standards. However, the reason it failed was not (IMO) because open standards were a bad idea.

The Open Standard initiatives failed at Google because they did not really know how to do UX. They have only recently started to figure it out.

(I would argue that Google+ is significantly better than OpenSocial ever was, and Google needs to improve it even further)

> Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses.

If that was the case, couldn't Google have sold the site to someone else, instead of scrapping it?

The amount of effort to decouple Reader from Google's internal infrastructure is not trivial.

I'm an engineer and not a business person but I imagine that finding someone to buy Reader and then executing the deal would also be non-trivial.