Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I think it's entirely fair. They came into a thriving market and killed it with a subsidized product pushed by an enormous brand. And then they did nothing with it.

I read Facebook and HN, but I subscribe to Newsblur because there are other good ways to get news. To me, Newsblur is the text equivalent of my podcast app: My tool for paying attention to particular sources and making sure I don't miss anything. Podcasts are also an inherently read-only medium, and just like newsreaders, people making podcasting apps don't really have to maintain a huge library of anything; it's the podcasters who do that.

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If I understand you correctly, big-brand companies shouldn't introduce new products in thriving markets.

Or if they do, they shouldn't get to subsidize them.

Or if they do, they have to switch to profitable or exit the market really quickly, so as to not screw up the market.

Or if they aren't profitable, they have to just keep adding features and hope to one day get profitable.

I honestly don't get what people think Google should do. I mean, people are PISSED at Google over Google Reader shutting down. WHY? Companies fail with their products, all the time.

If you keep taking a single point and drawing a line through it, you'll regularly fail to understand people.

I think Google Reader should have either a) taken their product seriously, or b) shut it down as soon as they decided it wasn't a priority.

Put another way, Google should have recognized much earlier that their giant presence means that they can accidentally ruin markets and done the responsible thing. The more power you have, the more responsibility you have.

If you don't understand the consequences of your argument, people will regularly complain that your argument makes no sense.

They spent large amounts of money preparing and operating Google Reader. There is no other way they could possibly prove to you that they took it more seriously, short of throwing MORE good money after bad.

They watched the growth curves, they added features (reader.google.com/play for one), they integrated with other products (Buzz), they waited for new products to be released and integrated with them as well (Google+).

At some point, they decided to leave the market.

Or they should have shut it down sooner? Before they added those features, before they integrated with other products, before the other products were released and before they integrated with them?

Taking it seriously = more time, more money.

Shutting down sooner = less time, less money.

It's apparently OBVIOUS to you exactly how much money they should have spent on it, how they should have prioritized their new features and integrations, and the precise date at which they should have shut down.

And it's so obvious to other people, that they get ultra pissed about it, and abandon all other Google products out of spite.

I wish I had your crystal ball.

Do you find that being a dick generally makes you more persuasive? Because it isn't working for me here.

Google Reader was well known within Google as an orphan project for a long time. Years before they shut it I was chatting with some Googler and Reader game up. He mentioned how impressive it was that it was still alive given how starved for resources it had been. I think he said that it was just one guy. And here's Reader's creator in 2011 acknowledging it was understaffed: http://massless.org/?p=174

So yes, they should have shut it down way sooner rather than starving it. That was irresponsible both internally (because it's a management failure) and externally (because they were harming a market that they weren't serious about).

I'm sorry I thought you started it, when you claimed that I was too stupid to understand you.

> He mentioned how impressive it was that it was still alive given how starved for resources it had been.

Everyone's pet-project is understaffed. That's how passionate people will always describe their favorite projects.

If you divide man-hours by revenue, you'll note that Google Reader was getting pretty close to infinite resources.

> rather than starving it.

Most, if not all, RSS aggregators don't DREAM of having the software tooling, crawling and storage resources, DevOps, and visibility that Google Reader had.

I say again, I wish I had your crystal ball for the correct amount of resources, and the correct amount of time to spend on a project.

It's pretty easy to armchair quarterback, though.

Why does everyone ignore the prevalence of free RSS readers when Google reader came along?

Why do you ask me that when I'm not ignoring them?

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