Comment by nemesisj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemesisj | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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