I don't think it's odd. I think the speculation that some reader features are being rolled into plus is accurate and google wants their internal people dog fooding those implementations.
If they were rolling it into G+, they would have announced that first. It simply doesn't make sense to lose your users and then try to regain them, instead of providing a migration strategy.
That might make sense if they are a one to one equivalent. I think it is unlikely to be the case however. Losing a few million users of a niche product doesn't matter to Google if it wasn't a large revenue stream. Rolling out features that fit the Google+ scheme as they are ready makes more sense to me.
I guess it's a sign of maturity when Google realizes that their own employees are not representative of the general Internet market that Google is targeting.
> Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire.
Oh come on: enough already. Obviously there was a /vocal/ user base which is very loudly now upset that the product is being sunset. Guess what, Google didn't see it as a large enough set of people to make it worth monetizing. Such is life. Move on. It's certainly not the end of Google if that's what this article is trying to imply. It isn't even the beginning of some horrible backlash either. It is however getting old.
I don't think people who use RSS realize what a small minority they are. I don't use RSS or Google Reader, I've never even seen it, but this week my Facebook has been filled by a tiny slice of my friends who are incredibly upset.
The vast majority are just shrugging and not caring one bit.
Only Google has the actual numbers on how many people are using their Reader, and they simply did the math. End of story. It's not going to affect Google one bit that they cancelled a tiny non-profitable product.
maybe in some professions, then it's a professional tool and not a "for everyone's" usage. There are several options out there aside from Google Reader, especially if you're willing to pay.
Yeah, that's the point of TFA. It's a professional tool for journalists and bloggers, or, even more bluntly, it's a professional tool for people with a platform to share their opinions.
Google reader is a pretty important tool for competitive intel. The only really tuneable alternatives are expensive services that don't do the job half as well.
As a regular user of reader, I'm more or less shrugging. The features I use aren't anything I can't put together for myself pretty simply out of available tools; having reader there just prevented me from bothering.
I realize I won't be getting things like the recommendations, but I've got plenty of feeds going presently. There may well be other features others love that I've been missing out on, but obviously I won't be missing them :-P
They aren't just vocal; more importantly, people listen to them. They are the people that get products across chasms, so when Google encourages them to look elsewhere, they are encouraging many more people to look elsewhere, too.
The big question, which TFA states but provides no evidence for, is whether pushing these influencers away from Reader also pushes them away from other services, too.
My personal opinion is, by itself, no; but if you make Reader the frosting on a cake of discontinued products, it just might. Now, the general unease of "Will this thing I care about get terminated next spring?" becomes a much stronger fear, because it is tied to the personal emotions of Reader being killed.
The point here is that your facebook has been filled. In other words, there may only be a few upset people, but they're people that other folks (like you) listen to.
In this case it doesn't matter, because the vast majority of my friends don't know what RSS is, don't care, don't use it, and don't care about Google Reader.
The few that cared posted their angry rants, and noone cared. Noone commented. It's a complete non-issue.
And even if you accept the premise of the article, that the ones who care about Google Reader are influencers, what exactly does that mean in practice? Google doesn't have very many services that regular people use. There's search, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's gmail, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's Google+, and you'll never get people to use that, because they've got Facebook, and it's only nerds on G+ anyway.
I get the abstract point of the article, that if you upset influential people, they'll badmouth your product, and the Microsoft Word example made a lot of sense, because it stopped people from buying the latest version of it and sticking with what they had.
But that scenario doesn't apply here. Those of you who are upset about this, exactly which Google services will you stop promoting to your friends, and which alternatives will you suggest?
The main issue for RSS seems to be that no one bothered to explain it in direct terms to all the tens of millions of people who rushed into the web starting around 2007.
The bigger issue isn't whether they influence the masses, it's whether they influence the decision makers who do matter to Google's revenue streams – and that's an open question, IMHO.
The idea that you can't rely on Google to keep services around is a bit of a chilling one for many and too much of that vibe may well mean that established companies and smart startups are more careful about what services they depend on (and who they get them from).
But we're not at that point yet... and Google is hardly alone in the general rug-pulling-out-from-under-you trend these days.
Reading the commentary on this I feel like I'm only schlep in the tech industry that didn't use Google Reader. But then I ask my non-tech friends and guess what 90% of them say "Oh, I had some feeds on there from awhile back but I never really read them that often". I wonder if the people who used it are such trendsetters why that is the case ...
That's exactly my situation. I set it up, used it for about a week a long time ago, and never logged into it again.
I think the coolest feature of it was its massive database of RSS feeds. I liked being able to flip through tons of categories and add them. However, it wasn't enough to keep me coming back, and that's probably why Google is discontinuing it.
I wish there was some way to export all those feeds, though.
What surprises me most is that Microsoft, which has a severe case of Google envy hasn't created a web based RSS service of it's own. They should make an offer to buy Reader and Feedburner too, since Google seems to have little interest in supporting these products.
That's exactly my situation. I set it up, used it for about a week a long time ago, and never logged into it again.
That pretty much describes my relationship with Twitter, and almost none of my friends use Twitter. But I don't think Twitter is any less important for that; likewise, don't let your lack of interest in Reader blind you to the fact that it has high utility for others.
It is more a combination of the small and vocal user base and the message it sends to them about Google being open to cutting any product that has a usage they don't think is significant. Those people who see Google cut a product that they have adopted into a regular usage will probably add an asterisk to any recommendation for adopting a new Google product. There is no certainty that the lifespan of that Google is dedicated to that product. With the shutting down or Reader, it sends a clear message that almost no product of Google's is safe and that we should all be wary of what of theirs we adopt into daily usage.
Orkut is big in Brazil and India, so it makes sense that Google wouldn't kill the only social media platform they own with an actual mainstream userbase (modulo YouTube).
I think google has been killing reader for awhile now. Me, and several people in my social circle had been using reader heavily for a while, to the point where it was like crack to me. But Once G+ came along and they killed the social bit of reader, they pretty much killed reader itself, we all stopped using it, and now they just have to swing the final axe...
You missed the article's point, which was that the vocal users were power users, and influencers.
Several tens of thousands of highly influential people are now less likely to speak well of google, less likely to install chrome on a friend's computer, less likely to urge a parent to switch to gmail, etc.
I don't know how big the effect will be; less likely is a relative term. (this confuses people to no end) But the effect will be stronger than numbers alone indicate.
Google did the math, and they used the numbers. What everyone is saying is that numbers are useless without a model. Now, GReader caters to the needs of the 9% in the 90-9-1 rule[1], so you could never expect it to see huge numbers of adopters. Google did the math wrong, because they set the wrong expectation, based on a wrong popularity model, and they will indeed suffer.
>Third, and lastly, Google is sending a strong signal to the market that it will have no mercy of killing whatever product it doesn’t think it’s going well.
Yep. I was just investigating Cloud SQL storage today and Google has a free Cloud SQL trial plan and decent pricing. I passed it over because I am concerned Google isn't interested in long term maintenance of products, and their support is non-existent. I'd rather go with some no-name startup that probably cares a lot more about my business.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google in an unrelated area]
Google platforms like Cloud SQL generally have a deprecation policy that will give you an idea of the minimum length of time that they'll be maintained. For Cloud SQL it's 1 year (it's in the Terms of Service), which means that you'd get at least a year's notice before it could be turned off. It's on par or slightly better than what I know of Amazon's policy (they have 1 year deprecation on their APIs and an undefined deprecation policy on their service offerings).
In my opnion having this deprecation policy would make Google Cloud SQL a lower risk proposition than a 'no-name startup', at least until the startup is in a position to make similar guarantees (and the financial resources to stick to those guarantees).
Edit: I guess my point is that some Google products have service agreements as to how long they'll be maintained and so comparing consumer web services to Cloud SQL isn't really appropriate.
And as everyone knows the word count tool initiated the downfall of microsoft word empire. Seriously, I don't think it was a bad decision to kill the reader. Not a nice one, but I think certainly not one where Google is going to learn a lesson about.
That wasn't quite the point -- it was that the influencers cared about the word-count tool. (You might also notice that Word currently has a word-count tool.)
I think his story got mangled in a game of telephone. Microsoft loves their word count. Competitors got bit by it, though:
This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
There are stories, though, of Microsoft shipping out beta copies of Microsoft Word with debugging all turned on, which made it slow, and despite saying so very carefully to all reviewers who got a copy, they still got torn apart for it being slow. I think the story is in "Coding The Microsoft Way" which I haven't seen in over a decade.
I'm unconvinced Google is about to learn anything because this isn't the first time they have killed a product with a large following. It seems now if a product doesn't generate at least 100 million, it isn't safe from being discontinued. So YouTube, will continue to live alongside Search, but it looks like Picassa is on its way to be rebranded "Google+Pictures"
Instead it looks like everyone else is going to learn tough lesson - Google isn't a charity, and anything that doesn't provide them any strategic value and/or revenue can be discontinued.
Of course, Google deserves to support/sunset whatever products they want.
The danger is that they've tasted Microsoft-level power in their ascendant Android/Chrome business, and want more.
There is a lot to be said about "leaving something on the table" and not maximizing everything. When you're the largest collector of personal data (other than perhaps the US Govt), you need goodwill or (influential) people will revile you.
Similar to the lesson(s) they learned after shutting down Google Code Search, Google Buzz, Jaiku, Google Health or any of the others? You just happened to like a product that was an overall failure. It happens.
Google officially lost the "we're not Facebook /Microsoft /Apple [other "evil empire"] company." They have played that game for way too long and many people fell for it. Since Larry Page took over, Google has lost it's soul; now it's just a greedy, money grubbing machine.
Yea, looking at OGinparadise's comment history, OGinparadise is the one who posted that Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems (I basically just ignore him now): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868
I used search twice and couldn't find I said that, point me to that comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868 Not that there is anything wrong on that, it could have been an opinion on anecdotal evidence. No one expects someone to check prices for 4-5 years first.
You accused me of saying "Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems" when I actually said "In case you didn't know, aggregators like Expedia often have the lowest price" and it's 100% true. What's false about it? Booking directly is in many cases more expensive than booking through a third party that has special pricing power.
You either post the full quote next time or drop it, you're wasting time and not achieving your goal, other than irritating people.
I think it's more a reaction to their general recent policy of doing far less away from their core business. They used to have a ton of projects with a very relaxed attitude about making money from any given project. Now that they've given up on focusing on that much beyond their bottom line, they're acting much more like other large companies which is not necessarily a good thing.
Like self driving cars and Google Glass? Or the cheap/free fiber optic Internet access? Or free Wi-Fi in NYC? I do not think you know what evil means...
Self driving cars are like Microsoft Hailstorm. It's all bombast for now and then somebody clever will steal their lunch.
And it is a deviation from their Google core.
The claim was that Google was moving away from products with a "relaxed attitude about making money", not "amazing, never done before", and the examples show they aren't.
until Google pulls the plug. That's the point.
Google has always done that. I don't understand where the rose colored glasses about Schmidt's time come from.
Also Android, I'd vote for Android over Google Reader every day and associated services like Play/Google Play Music (which is awesome by the way you should check it out) and hardware (Nexus 7). Oh and Go(lang) and Chrome with V8 which lead to Node JS being borne.
What's the point of a car that drives itself if there is nothing to read while you're driving? I was seriously looking forward to that - or even a text to speech app that reads Reader feeds.
You're asserting that providing free Internet access isn't evil? Have you ever once considered how it benefits Google? What possible motivations Google might have to want to know everything users do online?
So, here it is: Google does nothing altruistically. They are an ad company, and search is a fundamental component in service to that. Data collection is one fundamental pillar, establishing Google search on every device is another.
This may be the most tinfoil-hat-oriented post I have ever read on HN. To paraphrase: "Google benefits in some way from Google Fiber, so it's EVIL!!!!1"
Surely you can see how utterly insane that is? Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Google Fiber is 100% altruistic by any means. The position that a large base of Fiber installations would put them in is enviable in a number of ways, involving several of the markets they're involved in. However, completely dismissing the possibility that they saw an opportunity to disrupt the necrotic oligopoly BS we have in the ISP market and jumping straight to "EVIL!!" is beyond ridiculous. Google certainly has done a lot of things in the last few years that belie their early image, but the amount of times that "evil" has been thrown around to describe them is just laughable.
tl;dr: The definition of "not evil" is not "a 100% charitable endeavor with no conceivable benefit".
Well, first, I think you're reading too much into my use of the word "evil". But by your absolutist definition there's no reasonable way Google can violate this ethic they've imposed on themselves.
Any company of sufficient size will be "evil", in that they will act in an anti-competitive, anti-user, or anti-interoperability way if it benefits their stock price. There is no other consideration. I'm sure everyone can think of things Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook have done that they would consider "evil" by that definition.
Building a fiber network with the primary goal of gathering data on what users do online (perhaps after clicking on a Google search result from the Google Chrome browser), and being able without any trouble whatsoever to tie that back to an individual is, if not "evil", at least fairly creepy. And there are plenty of other benefits to controlling user access literally from the desktop to the Internet backbone.
Google is not unique in this. Every large software company is trying to wall off users so they can control their access. Google, however, enjoys enormous goodwill with some people as a result of their motto and innovator status.
I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.
Google did that to websites too: first they penalized a slew of sites such as local search, travel, finance, shopping comparison for having "shallow content," and then they introduced the Google versions of said sites, on top of everyone else on search results.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because ultimately, search engines should be smart enough to understand the semantics of the search to an extern where a special curated vertical isn't needed anymore. When Jean Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for the nearest Starbase, it doesn't tell him to phone up StarBases.com and ask them for a list instead.
When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.
Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.
If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites.
Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typical of companies that gain a monopoly in a field. You can argue that they might have a right to do it, not that it is the right thing to do. If major websites go out of business, how is the web better off? Google produces no content and now wants to send no clicks to the producers.
>> When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it.
Yes, but Google decided that they have the best reviews and best price. Either way, they gained share by being nice and now they are on top, with lots of money to buy off protection from politicians. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/google-accumulat...
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly.
Google clones everything and when those cloned go out of business, consumers lose. Any hope that they may charge $1 /month vanishes when Google clones their app /features.
Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
Mozilla is one company, Google clones a product and uses it's billion users to have it adopted. Imagine if Microsoft used that muscle to have users adopt Bing or IE, by showing ads for them virtually each time you went online.
Vertical crawlers and linkfarms going out of business is different than publishers going out of business. The web's fertile lifeblood is content, federated, distributed, content accessible by URL. I worry more about newspapers going out of business than comparison shopping sites or RSS readers that never could charge $1 per month, that's nostalgia for a history that never existed.
The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.
There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.
If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.
Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.
People seem to be clamoring for subscriptions to ostensibly free services that come at a cost, whether it's the threat of cancellation or restrictive use of their APIs. That's why App.net got so much buzz, remember?
What I said is a problem simply because of Google's market power, power they got by behaving differently. You don't care if people pay on everything they find through Google simply because that benefits Google. You also don't seem to care if Google, with 70%-99% market share penalizes competitors in search.
With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.
What Google did, evil or not, was not EEE. The purpose of EEE was to kill only the competitors' product, not their own, by extending it and making everyone else incompatible with the new formats and/or protocols. That's not what Google did here.
This was my second thought when Google announced that they were retiring Reader (the first was "Nooo!")
Half of my friends use Gmail because I suggested that they switch. I am starting to see Google move toward the dark side, and that means you won't see me recommending Google products to friends. It'll take a while, but there will be backlash... because I'm not the only one in this boat.
Axing the reader makes my private and professional life/work way more complicated. That is the first time that a Google believer like me feels they pulled the rug under me.
In what way is this a move "towards the dark side"? I understand it's disappointing, but whenever someone doesn't do what you want, do you assume they're evil?
There's an underlying sense of entitlement in the tech community that really rubs me the wrong way sometimes, honestly. Sometimes folks are going to make decisions that you don't agree with. That doesn't justify freaking out. "Getting disappointed" shouldn't be filed in the same drawer with "getting cheated" or other such violations.
It makes google untrustworthy , where a big entity like Google is supposed to offer stable services. I would have paid for reader , the cost is not an issue , the issue is killing a service without even offering an alternative. The google "dont be evil" propaganda is over. They are as bad as Microsoft and should by treated likewise by the press. And we all know how the press deals with Microsoft.
On what basis does it make Google untrustworthy? Was there some kind of announcement that this service would run forever? Or was that simply your expectation?
It's important to differentiate between what other parties are obligated or have promised to do, and what you want them to do. Failing to deliver on the latter is not a violation of trust. It's like saying someone you dated is untrustworthy because they decided to break up with you and they didn't find you someone new to date.
I agree that "dark side" is over the top. (I never thought Microsoft was so terrible either.)
Maybe some of the resentment here is from the lingering feeling that Google should still be the best thing on the internet. For quite a long time, everything they did, they did so amazingly well. I loved that company.
They got worse, the rest of the internet got better, and they really don't stand out the way they did. But sometimes I forget that the new Google isn't the same as the old Google, and I feel stung about things like this.
(FWIW, I don't blame them for doing something about Reader. I just wish they had tried selling it on subscription before fitting it for concrete shoes.)
I've seen a handful of people say that they would have been willing to pay for Reader. But overall, I imagine that the complaining would have been just as loud had they started charging users for something that was previously free. And what if it was still unprofitable? They'd need to go through all the complaints a second time if they decided to close it down anyway.
Perhaps google learns a tough lesson. Or perhaps bloggers who think they are "influencers" are going to learn a tough lesson about how much impact their influence really has.
Google knows what they're doing. They haven't forgotten the outrage that happened after they stripped the social features out of reader and replaced it with the +1 button. They knew all those people and more would be pissed. And they decided it didn't matter.
It's not the same thing. When G+ killed Google Reader's "sharebro" social network, Google Reader still was the best feed reader of the market by a long shot. Just like now, there was nowhere to run. Heck, I kept using it, just like anyone complaining. I kept recommending it because it was GReader or a fucking magazine-layout shitty app.
But now they are definetely killing it, and it will affect the users in a different way. They are trashing away the app so there's no way a user can simply adapt. Before you could say "well, at least I can keep reading the feeds". Now you got nothing.
About influencers, well, there are lots of people with a good chunk of influence using GReader. They might make a dent on how people perceive Google's app reliability. Even a small one could end up in some financial loss. If it would be significant to them, only time will tell.
By the way, have you noticed that the Google+ still didn't catch up? What if it's Google Reader users fault? Think about it.
I sympathize with Google Reader users. I find it occasionally tiresome to be half-foot in an ecosystem. But I've come to accept that this is just the way that Google does things.
I love Gmail/Calendar/Maps/DamnNearEverything. I love Groups, which they've recently taken pains to hide[1] so I suspect its up soon for the chopping block. Heck I even love Google+.
All that said, at least they had the gall to kill it. One thing that pains me more than killing a product they don't want is letting one languish broken for ages.
I'm fully in the G-cosystem[2] but sadly Google Finance is nearly worthless, and only edited about once a year, usually to break something and fix it a month later.
You can't switch to a current (non-closed) holdings view where it only shows you information about stocks you own right now, instead you have to make two portfolios. You can't reorder portfolios so my real portfolios and my "lookers" are separated in an awkward list. News stories are half spam and appear out of order anyway. Finance doesn't sync well with the Android app, sometimes it finds zero portfolios and makes me make temporary mobile ones that I have to delete later.
How many Java errors are on the Finance homepage today? Just one. How about on a stock ticker page? Thirty-one. And it's still using Flash.
I don't think the Reader backlash will hurt Google. There are just some products they plainly don't care about and will continue to ignore them until somebody brushes over the "shutter" button while the rest of the company shrugs.
I think it will hurt Google. Who use reader ? journalists , analysts , and they are pissed off. I dont recall such a huge reaction when other Google services shut down.
"Yep. And it never figured out how to handle high-vol and low-vol blogs together in any meaningful way". What I always thought but was never able to articulate so well (hi again fellow twitter user).
How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"? I guess I'm not really sure what the problem is: it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once, if that is the issue.
>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!
That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.
Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.
> Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.
What about a cloud-based app that kept synced across your devices? I wonder if it would be possible to create a client that would let you quickly read Twitter, app.net and feed content, and filter the latter two? (So long as you stay below the 100,000 user mark?)
I know the problem, not the solution, but maybe calculating the popularity among the people I follow on twitter (or the ones following the ones I follow in case that dataset is not big enough) to show me a lot less articles for frequent-publisher.
So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.
IMO, that's exactly why Reader exists - structure and creating personal consumption patterns. Social networking is useless for that, it's like recommending replacing a library with a disco pub. Disco pubs are fine places, lots of fun to be had there, but recommending it as a substitute for the library is crazy. RSS/Reader is completely different use case.
Ok, "personal consumption patterns" now means the authors I want to get updated about. A better analogy would be subscribing to see what an author publishes and subscribing to hear about what everyone is reading; sure, you get a lot of noise but is way more opening and less self-centered. And if you happen to like a lot of authors you get more focus in the ones that are more likely to be of your enjoyment because people like you are working as a quality filter.
I like self-centered. I don't want to read what everyone is reading, I want to read what interests me. If I'd want to know what everyone is reading, I can subscribe to one feed of "what everyone is reading". Why would I rely on "people like me" to be a filter if I have the best option - me - and I already have these filters set up in a way that suits me?
I of course do not refuse input of others - I read dozens of blogs. But I want to do it my way, not as a dump which mixes discussion on a national budget with pictures of somebody's half-eaten breakfast.
its a problem I've thought about too. its a big problem on twitter.
some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.
you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.
so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.
a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.
> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once
I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.
> Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.
They have been really destroying Groups for a while now. The new ui is terrible, the new url format is also bad. They got rid of instructions for emailing for subscriptions, and someone reported to me earlier today that emailing list+subscribe@googlegroups.com doesn't even work anymore.... are they just going to dump their usenet archives?
It's probably too late to ask now (the story was posted 19+ hours ago, as I write this), but -- do you know what happened to Google Groups digest emails? They just stopped working for me a long time ago, with no communication about what happened.
No, I don't use the digest email feature. Sorry. The other day I had to clean out some old Groups subscriptions, because apparently you can only subscribe to 200 groups at a time. What a fucking joke. :(
I really wish Github would fill the Groups niche because they would do it 100x better and most of the groups I'm in are coding related anyways. Especially if they really are trying to do collaboration in general...
Agreed about finance too. It's too bad it's so crappy.
I love Marcello and am a fan, but this is an emotional, not well thought through reaction.
The best leaders, the best organizations, the ones that create excellence, are those that are as good at saying no as they are at saying yes.
I've worked at a large company. It is easy for outsiders to think "oh, they have infinite resources and can do anything". This is not the case at all.
I am not much of a Google fan. I dropped Reader about 2 years ago and have used NewsBlur since. The only Google product I like is Chrome.
Google will continue to be successful, not by doing a bazillion little things poorly, but a few things, really, really well.
And to do a few things, really, really well, you have to be excellent at saying no. Google has decided Reader is a little thing it could not do really, really, well. So it is saying no.
I applaud that. (Even if it's caused NewsBlur to become almost too slow to use).
What are "influencers" going to do about it? Give Reader a bad review? Complain about the death of a product no one knew existed? I don't see how they have any leverage in this situation. The comparison with Microsoft's Word Count incident seems weakly relevant.
>> What are "influencers" going to do about it? Give Reader a bad review?
No, but you may start seeing instances of phrases like "I wonder how long it will be until FeatureX/ProductY gets the boot like Reader did" or "Perhaps this product will languish for years without innovation like Reader" or "Maybe Google will opt to ignore users of this product too" in the press related to Google products. Next time Google kills a product, the media will reflect about how it's "just as bad as what they did with Reader in 2013." Killing widely used products is now something Google does; it is a behavior they are now strongly associated with.
In terms of influencers, it's not about the individual product, it's about the behavior of the company that operated it. Don't piss off the people that give you free advertising by taking out features they like, even if they're the only ones who use them.
>> a product no one knew existed
While I find that a stretch, the point the article was making is that no one needs to know of the existence of Reader for this to have a negative impact on Google. Except for the influencers, who did.
View Google at a new light, not give them the benefit of a doubt. If Google does something, they'll try to see what's the catch. Google has gotten a lot of good, free press
Well, I've been a strong promoter of Google's products over the years; I recommend them to others, show people how to use them, use them for project organization (thus pushing my usage pattern out to the rest of a team) and so on. I'm not about to suddenly stop doing that, but I feel an awful less invested than I did 48 hours ago.
As an average Joe, I am preparing to go on Google-free diet come July 1. Firefox, Bing, Outlook. Will find a reader somehow. These are the daily habits which accumulate over time and provide GOOGLE what it needs to survive. So will do everything possible to cut down the ...
The right way to respond to this backlash would be to make Reader a paid app and tell people it'll stay while enough pay for it (and of course be transparent about user count etc). I can't see Google going that way though, it was free and if they don't want to pay to support it there's no reason to expect them to.
Reader is getting the axe because it's getting in the way of the new protege project, G+.
They can't have anything holding Google from becoming what they think Facebook should be.
In fact, they don't just want to become/defeat Facebook, but also Apple (see Nexus/Chromebook) and Amazon (see Shopping Express), not to mention Groupon (see Offers). By trying to be all things, they will become none.
They are on the path to becoming Microsoft. I desperately hope that the Glass/Driverless-car part of the company prevails in corporate culture. I fear that will not be the case.
> By trying to be all things, they will become none.
I just agree 100% they are an advertising company ,that's all they will ever be. The rest is bull. And i'm not going to use any of their vaporware anymore. But it's a great wake up call against all this Saas bull* , i guess journalists had a taste of what the implications of cloud computing are.
I don't think that's fair. They're an AI/machine learning company at heart now. Primarily that powers advertising of course, but they have the potential to do so much more.
Of course. We shouldn't expect them to pursue things that some people might deem "cool" and their shareholders will deem a loss leader, but to argue that they are just an advertising company is to miss the bulk of what they do in my opinion. They'd be nowhere without AI and machine learning, and really are pushing boundaries of where we can take them things. Primarily to sell adverts and be profitable sure, but what they are doing is not equatable to any other company that sells adverts.
An article full of nonsense. Discontinuing Google Reader IS NOT sending a message to enterprises that they should not use Google product for the long term.
Sorry, but your statement needs more to back it up, because the opposing viewpoint has an easy logical justification. Why should companies transfer their core infrastructure onto Google's products if they know Google might decide one day to discontinue them?
I know lots of companies rely on and pay for GMail, I'm sure it won't be discontinued anytime soon, but I'm also sure this event puts thoughts in the back of many people's minds about that eventuality.
Companies don't run their infrastructure off Google Reader! How can you compare this to gmail? Google makes money off gmail (Companies pay for Google apps) - not Google Reader...
The day that e-mail becomes widely irrelevant is the day that Google thoughtfully cancels Gmail. Google is a business. If they lose enough customers, it's not worth maintaining an expensive system just to satisfy the vocal minority who gets up and writes self-entitled articles like OP's. Google has been pulling plugs on services for the longest time; they're not a charity, they're a company. I don't think this makes them evil!
If Google is shutting down reader, are they going to remove RSS feeds from Blogger? What about Feedburner?
I think Google's better move would have been cut a few features and 'Plus-ify' Reader - kinda like they have been doing with their other products. They would have evolved an important user base, shown commitment to the RSS standard, and kept a number of important apps using their api's.
Aren't they after all supposed to be championing the open web?
I don't think this is intentional, but it now hard to argue againsT people saying that they intentionally waited till they killed the RSS readers market and then shut down their product.
"Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars?
Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields.
The lesson they learned correctly was that focus is essential. RSS is dead. A handful of nerds enjoy it, it solves a handful of problems, but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
So they cut it and they're not even going to notice it in the rearview mirror.
In an amusing, if anecdotal, aside – Gina Trapani, an OG nerd influencer if ever there was one, tweeted that she'd checked out of Google Reader long ago.
> You dont know a damn thing about RSS , Aaron Schwartz did not died so a dch like you can claim RSS is dead , go back to your Twitter/Facebook/write your dumb social network here/ sandbox ... you just dont have a clue...
What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles?
RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user.
It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.
Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth.
Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.)
What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.
Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service.
To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search.
If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem.
Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"
People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail.
To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.
Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.
>People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.
Aren't you a charmer.
I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow.
And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface.
I used to think that way, back when I had a Yahoo account. Now, lots of people could clone GMail and I wouldn't switch, because it's a decent service and pretty sticky. But on those infrequent occasions when I encounter a product that's a Big Leap Forward, I just migrate.
Search is the moat for me. Switching email is not nearly as big of a deal.
I use gmail daily, many times, but I don't actually need gmail site. I rarely even go there. What I need is a free and reliable mail storage server that supports IMAP. I'll take it from there. Same with GReader - I need free and reliable feed aggregator, and then I'll use the tools to consume it.
I am sad Google is getting out of this market, since that brings me inconvenience of migration. But I'm sure the niche will be filled in.
The cost of switching may be low but familiarity is a powerful motivator to stay. We saw this with Office 2007 drawing so much ire despite the ribbon interface being quite good. We're seeing it again to an extent because of the don't-call-it-Metro interface in Windows 8.
"Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service."
Google's dominance in search has nothing to do with customer switching costs. They are dominant because, imperfections and privacy issues aside, they legitimately have the best performing search engine on the market. They are able to retain this position because search is an extremely difficult and resource intensive technical problem (like mapping), that nobody has been able to credibly challenge them on since they took over.
If someone builds a better search engine than google, then yes, their position will be precarious, regardless of the other ways they've roped people in. But none of the current crop of competitors give any reason to believe this is imminent.
The point is that the 'influencers' will be aware of alternatives and are vocal about it. If you use a service of google's because there is another service of gooogle's that you use a lot - the tie is a lot looser, and when people are suggested alternatives it becomes a lot easier for them to move away.
While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store.
I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain.
That probably won't be the case any more.
So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer.
This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone
It made me look into Bing and the new Live. I like the web-based Office apps better than the Google equivalents, and Bing produces more of the kind of results I look for. I was among those who pushed Google early on, helped people get away from IE (to Firefox, and later Chrome), and talked up Gmail from the moment they let me in.
I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.
I don't see how Gina is a good example. She's been a Twitter fan for a long time. There's too much overlap with GReader, so it makes sense she would pick one over the other. That doesn't make RSS "dead".
Google's biggest risk from the press might be regulatory. Politicians and political appointees still pay close attention to the press, and Microsoft is always agitating in the background for an antitrust proceeding against Google. A pissed-off press corps might decide to "take a closer look" at the power Google wields in the online marketplace. This could help provide political cover to move against them.
I'm reading all these comments about "RSS is dead" and how everybody uses Facebook for it now and I'm completely confused. How you can even use Facebook for this? Facebook is totally useless as a reading list organizer, it is useful for sharing lolcats pictures, but if you need structure and organize known sources of information and keeping track of what you read and what you didn't - Facebook is as useful as a trombone in a Moon landing mission. The only conclusion I can make is that these people don't mean by reading the same thing as I do. Maybe for them lolcats and pics of each other's dinners is reading...
When people say RSS is dead they're not saying its use case has been 100% effectively covered by another product/protocol. What they're saying is that people are using Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc as a replacement in the most basic sense: a feed of content that they can read. Whether you or I think that this is an adequate replacement for RSS is irrelevant because the assertion being made is that enough people think it is a good-enough replacement.
If it isn't Google search or Gmail, I'm not making any decisions that depend on it. It's that simple. And frankly, I'm likely moving my email off it as soon as I get some spare bandwidth to find something I like enough. (I really like webmail.)
I guess they're doing everything they can to get everyone to Google+. If they can't bait you, they force you. They want their own Facebook. Probably Blogger will also be phased out as soon as they afford to.
But I don't think the future will belong neither to Google+ nor Facebook. I'm looking forward to a descentralized, user centric platform, that anyone can run on its raspberry pi box at home, that allows you to manage your data however you please.
They are still "enhancing" Blogger. Less than a month ago they introduced a drastic change in the image-upload UI that basically broke it for everyone. It appears to have been meant as an improvement but whoever did it, clearly didn't understand who used it and how. Now they are "looking at" how they can fix it.
So what are the good alternatives to Blogger? And what if you have multiple blogs with hundreds of posts in them? Reader at least is emphemeral, there's no investment of work at risk.
WordPress.com can import from Blogger, and then export an almost human-readable XML file with posts. It costs money to point your own domain at it, but it has a DNS editor (text-based, but it has some click-based tools). It's worth the small price if you're concerned with easy portability.
And it's not a peripheral service like Blogger. Automattic is WordPress.com, and all their peripheral products exist to serve it. The best part? You can take your WordPress.com and turn it into an identical WordPress.org with a billion different service providers.
the thing is I quite like G+. I'm not a heavy user, it has flaws, but I am interested in what they are doing with it. If they were folding Reader into it in some meaningful way, I would feel a lot better about it.
Sure, it's far more efficient and profitable to make an integrated platform with all major features at hand, I'm for that too, what bothers me is that I don't have full control over my data.
Parts of this post are premised the "influencer" marketing model, but there is at least some research indicating that it might not be as powerful as generally assumed. For example:
Meh, I don't use google reader or really care, but I am pissed they plan on ending igoogle in November. It's insane to me that they will do this.
It's my homepage and I'm sure millions of other people's homepages. Setting your homepage to an internet company's site is pretty much their whole goal. It's insane to me that they will give this up.
> Setting your homepage to an internet company's site is pretty much their whole goal.
That always felt hokey to me. I was always more likely to "homepage" a website that just gave me great content and proportionately less likely to "homepage" a site that wanted to be my home page. This is why HN/reddit are basically this for me.
I think we all tend to assume that our computer habits are shared by millions of nameless other people. Presumably, Google have data on how many people visit igoogle, and it doesn't seem worth keeping.
My nameless millions and I no longer have a 'homepage' - the browser just starts with the tabs I had open last time.
It shouldn't really come as a surprise that Google is acting more and more now like a big established company with shareholders (which they are). When you become an established industry leader (as a profit-driven shareholder company), you tend to focus on minimising overheads, cutting cruft and focusing on core profit-driven services.
They aren't going to be benevolent dictators of the internet forever - we should be thankful that their benevolence has lasted so long (and still is lasting through many free services provided).
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadWhy is that kind of maturity good these days? For whom?
Oh come on: enough already. Obviously there was a /vocal/ user base which is very loudly now upset that the product is being sunset. Guess what, Google didn't see it as a large enough set of people to make it worth monetizing. Such is life. Move on. It's certainly not the end of Google if that's what this article is trying to imply. It isn't even the beginning of some horrible backlash either. It is however getting old.
The vast majority are just shrugging and not caring one bit.
Only Google has the actual numbers on how many people are using their Reader, and they simply did the math. End of story. It's not going to affect Google one bit that they cancelled a tiny non-profitable product.
Though, the majority of people here aren't using Google Reader - so I guess I'm a minority there - but they're using "Bloglovin".
They're pretty large it seems.
I realize I won't be getting things like the recommendations, but I've got plenty of feeds going presently. There may well be other features others love that I've been missing out on, but obviously I won't be missing them :-P
The problem is that some minorities count more than others, because they are influential (vocal, if you prefer).
The big question, which TFA states but provides no evidence for, is whether pushing these influencers away from Reader also pushes them away from other services, too.
My personal opinion is, by itself, no; but if you make Reader the frosting on a cake of discontinued products, it just might. Now, the general unease of "Will this thing I care about get terminated next spring?" becomes a much stronger fear, because it is tied to the personal emotions of Reader being killed.
Math is useless without a good model. The article challenges their model and rightly so.
Maybe you don't realise how many they are?
I mean, your very next line admits total ignorance:
>I don't use RSS or Google Reader, I've never even seen it
Thing is, people who have successful technical blogs know that lots of people come from Google Reader.
So even if it's a minority, it's a pretty important minority in the business.
They do: Contributors (curators) are, grossly, 9% of total users (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...)
The few that cared posted their angry rants, and noone cared. Noone commented. It's a complete non-issue.
And even if you accept the premise of the article, that the ones who care about Google Reader are influencers, what exactly does that mean in practice? Google doesn't have very many services that regular people use. There's search, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's gmail, and you'll never get people to stop using that. There's Google+, and you'll never get people to use that, because they've got Facebook, and it's only nerds on G+ anyway.
I get the abstract point of the article, that if you upset influential people, they'll badmouth your product, and the Microsoft Word example made a lot of sense, because it stopped people from buying the latest version of it and sticking with what they had.
But that scenario doesn't apply here. Those of you who are upset about this, exactly which Google services will you stop promoting to your friends, and which alternatives will you suggest?
The main issue for RSS seems to be that no one bothered to explain it in direct terms to all the tens of millions of people who rushed into the web starting around 2007.
The idea that you can't rely on Google to keep services around is a bit of a chilling one for many and too much of that vibe may well mean that established companies and smart startups are more careful about what services they depend on (and who they get them from).
But we're not at that point yet... and Google is hardly alone in the general rug-pulling-out-from-under-you trend these days.
I think the coolest feature of it was its massive database of RSS feeds. I liked being able to flip through tons of categories and add them. However, it wasn't enough to keep me coming back, and that's probably why Google is discontinuing it.
I wish there was some way to export all those feeds, though.
What surprises me most is that Microsoft, which has a severe case of Google envy hasn't created a web based RSS service of it's own. They should make an offer to buy Reader and Feedburner too, since Google seems to have little interest in supporting these products.
That pretty much describes my relationship with Twitter, and almost none of my friends use Twitter. But I don't think Twitter is any less important for that; likewise, don't let your lack of interest in Reader blind you to the fact that it has high utility for others.
Curiously, some products that are moribund for more time still alive (e.g. Orkut).
Several tens of thousands of highly influential people are now less likely to speak well of google, less likely to install chrome on a friend's computer, less likely to urge a parent to switch to gmail, etc.
I don't know how big the effect will be; less likely is a relative term. (this confuses people to no end) But the effect will be stronger than numbers alone indicate.
etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...
Yep. I was just investigating Cloud SQL storage today and Google has a free Cloud SQL trial plan and decent pricing. I passed it over because I am concerned Google isn't interested in long term maintenance of products, and their support is non-existent. I'd rather go with some no-name startup that probably cares a lot more about my business.
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-sql
Google platforms like Cloud SQL generally have a deprecation policy that will give you an idea of the minimum length of time that they'll be maintained. For Cloud SQL it's 1 year (it's in the Terms of Service), which means that you'd get at least a year's notice before it could be turned off. It's on par or slightly better than what I know of Amazon's policy (they have 1 year deprecation on their APIs and an undefined deprecation policy on their service offerings).
In my opnion having this deprecation policy would make Google Cloud SQL a lower risk proposition than a 'no-name startup', at least until the startup is in a position to make similar guarantees (and the financial resources to stick to those guarantees).
Edit: I guess my point is that some Google products have service agreements as to how long they'll be maintained and so comparing consumer web services to Cloud SQL isn't really appropriate.
This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
From former Microsoft employee Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html He has links to reviews in the original
There are stories, though, of Microsoft shipping out beta copies of Microsoft Word with debugging all turned on, which made it slow, and despite saying so very carefully to all reviewers who got a copy, they still got torn apart for it being slow. I think the story is in "Coding The Microsoft Way" which I haven't seen in over a decade.
Instead it looks like everyone else is going to learn tough lesson - Google isn't a charity, and anything that doesn't provide them any strategic value and/or revenue can be discontinued.
The danger is that they've tasted Microsoft-level power in their ascendant Android/Chrome business, and want more.
There is a lot to be said about "leaving something on the table" and not maximizing everything. When you're the largest collector of personal data (other than perhaps the US Govt), you need goodwill or (influential) people will revile you.
Nothing is sacred anymore, no matter how much they repeat http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/
I'm not suggesting that google is/isn't evil these days, but I would suggest that there is absolutely no moral aspect to discontinuing a feed reader.
You either post the full quote next time or drop it, you're wasting time and not achieving your goal, other than irritating people.
Self driving cars, like this http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57367893-71/a-self-driving... or http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/04/autos/toyota-self-driving-ca... or http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416535,00.asp ?
Tell me what's so amazing, never done before, about Glass? Google is seeing ads there.
Fiber and WIFI, while extremely limited in geography* and are great, until Google pulls the plug. That's the point.
*There's no "Free wifi in NYC from Google", just in a tiny neighborhood.
until Google pulls the plug. That's the point.
Google has always done that. I don't understand where the rose colored glasses about Schmidt's time come from.
So, here it is: Google does nothing altruistically. They are an ad company, and search is a fundamental component in service to that. Data collection is one fundamental pillar, establishing Google search on every device is another.
Surely you can see how utterly insane that is? Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Google Fiber is 100% altruistic by any means. The position that a large base of Fiber installations would put them in is enviable in a number of ways, involving several of the markets they're involved in. However, completely dismissing the possibility that they saw an opportunity to disrupt the necrotic oligopoly BS we have in the ISP market and jumping straight to "EVIL!!" is beyond ridiculous. Google certainly has done a lot of things in the last few years that belie their early image, but the amount of times that "evil" has been thrown around to describe them is just laughable.
tl;dr: The definition of "not evil" is not "a 100% charitable endeavor with no conceivable benefit".
Any company of sufficient size will be "evil", in that they will act in an anti-competitive, anti-user, or anti-interoperability way if it benefits their stock price. There is no other consideration. I'm sure everyone can think of things Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook have done that they would consider "evil" by that definition.
Building a fiber network with the primary goal of gathering data on what users do online (perhaps after clicking on a Google search result from the Google Chrome browser), and being able without any trouble whatsoever to tie that back to an individual is, if not "evil", at least fairly creepy. And there are plenty of other benefits to controlling user access literally from the desktop to the Internet backbone.
Google is not unique in this. Every large software company is trying to wall off users so they can control their access. Google, however, enjoys enormous goodwill with some people as a result of their motto and innovator status.
I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.
When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.
Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.
If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.
Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typical of companies that gain a monopoly in a field. You can argue that they might have a right to do it, not that it is the right thing to do. If major websites go out of business, how is the web better off? Google produces no content and now wants to send no clicks to the producers.
>> When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it.
Yes, but Google decided that they have the best reviews and best price. Either way, they gained share by being nice and now they are on top, with lots of money to buy off protection from politicians. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/google-accumulat...
What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly.
Google clones everything and when those cloned go out of business, consumers lose. Any hope that they may charge $1 /month vanishes when Google clones their app /features.
Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.
Mozilla is one company, Google clones a product and uses it's billion users to have it adopted. Imagine if Microsoft used that muscle to have users adopt Bing or IE, by showing ads for them virtually each time you went online.
The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.
There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.
If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.
Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.
With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.
Yes, it is. However, not because of the Reader. It happened years ago, you just didn't notice :)
Half of my friends use Gmail because I suggested that they switch. I am starting to see Google move toward the dark side, and that means you won't see me recommending Google products to friends. It'll take a while, but there will be backlash... because I'm not the only one in this boat.
Axing the reader makes my private and professional life/work way more complicated. That is the first time that a Google believer like me feels they pulled the rug under me.
There's an underlying sense of entitlement in the tech community that really rubs me the wrong way sometimes, honestly. Sometimes folks are going to make decisions that you don't agree with. That doesn't justify freaking out. "Getting disappointed" shouldn't be filed in the same drawer with "getting cheated" or other such violations.
It's important to differentiate between what other parties are obligated or have promised to do, and what you want them to do. Failing to deliver on the latter is not a violation of trust. It's like saying someone you dated is untrustworthy because they decided to break up with you and they didn't find you someone new to date.
Maybe some of the resentment here is from the lingering feeling that Google should still be the best thing on the internet. For quite a long time, everything they did, they did so amazingly well. I loved that company.
They got worse, the rest of the internet got better, and they really don't stand out the way they did. But sometimes I forget that the new Google isn't the same as the old Google, and I feel stung about things like this.
(FWIW, I don't blame them for doing something about Reader. I just wish they had tried selling it on subscription before fitting it for concrete shoes.)
Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
Google knows what they're doing. They haven't forgotten the outrage that happened after they stripped the social features out of reader and replaced it with the +1 button. They knew all those people and more would be pissed. And they decided it didn't matter.
But now they are definetely killing it, and it will affect the users in a different way. They are trashing away the app so there's no way a user can simply adapt. Before you could say "well, at least I can keep reading the feeds". Now you got nothing.
About influencers, well, there are lots of people with a good chunk of influence using GReader. They might make a dent on how people perceive Google's app reliability. Even a small one could end up in some financial loss. If it would be significant to them, only time will tell.
By the way, have you noticed that the Google+ still didn't catch up? What if it's Google Reader users fault? Think about it.
I love Gmail/Calendar/Maps/DamnNearEverything. I love Groups, which they've recently taken pains to hide[1] so I suspect its up soon for the chopping block. Heck I even love Google+.
All that said, at least they had the gall to kill it. One thing that pains me more than killing a product they don't want is letting one languish broken for ages.
I'm fully in the G-cosystem[2] but sadly Google Finance is nearly worthless, and only edited about once a year, usually to break something and fix it a month later.
You can't switch to a current (non-closed) holdings view where it only shows you information about stocks you own right now, instead you have to make two portfolios. You can't reorder portfolios so my real portfolios and my "lookers" are separated in an awkward list. News stories are half spam and appear out of order anyway. Finance doesn't sync well with the Android app, sometimes it finds zero portfolios and makes me make temporary mobile ones that I have to delete later.
How many Java errors are on the Finance homepage today? Just one. How about on a stock ticker page? Thirty-one. And it's still using Flash.
I don't think the Reader backlash will hurt Google. There are just some products they plainly don't care about and will continue to ignore them until somebody brushes over the "shutter" button while the rest of the company shrugs.
~~~
[1] http://i.imgur.com/bs7i5pL.png
Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.
[2] I cringed writing that but it was too good to let go.
https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280
An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!
I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.
That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.
Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.
What about a cloud-based app that kept synced across your devices? I wonder if it would be possible to create a client that would let you quickly read Twitter, app.net and feed content, and filter the latter two? (So long as you stay below the 100,000 user mark?)
some people post rarely, and they often have very high quality well thought out posts. others are media outlets or blabber mouths.
you can balance them by presenting a feed of what is new, moving each item through the "what's new" section at a speed relative to that feed's post frequency.
so a feed that posts rarely would have its new items persist in the new area for a longer time.
a feed that posts 20 times a day would move its posts through the new area each day.
> it's pretty easy to put all your high volume stuff into a single category so you can mark everything read at once
I have thousands of subscriptions. I'm not going to take the time to judge and separate them. this is a job for a computer.
They have been really destroying Groups for a while now. The new ui is terrible, the new url format is also bad. They got rid of instructions for emailing for subscriptions, and someone reported to me earlier today that emailing list+subscribe@googlegroups.com doesn't even work anymore.... are they just going to dump their usenet archives?
Agreed about finance too. It's too bad it's so crappy.
The best leaders, the best organizations, the ones that create excellence, are those that are as good at saying no as they are at saying yes.
I've worked at a large company. It is easy for outsiders to think "oh, they have infinite resources and can do anything". This is not the case at all.
I am not much of a Google fan. I dropped Reader about 2 years ago and have used NewsBlur since. The only Google product I like is Chrome.
Google will continue to be successful, not by doing a bazillion little things poorly, but a few things, really, really well.
And to do a few things, really, really well, you have to be excellent at saying no. Google has decided Reader is a little thing it could not do really, really, well. So it is saying no.
I applaud that. (Even if it's caused NewsBlur to become almost too slow to use).
Google doesn't say "No." They say "Yes... yes... yes... no! Just kidding! Psych!"
I can't tie my personal or corporate strategy to that.
No, but you may start seeing instances of phrases like "I wonder how long it will be until FeatureX/ProductY gets the boot like Reader did" or "Perhaps this product will languish for years without innovation like Reader" or "Maybe Google will opt to ignore users of this product too" in the press related to Google products. Next time Google kills a product, the media will reflect about how it's "just as bad as what they did with Reader in 2013." Killing widely used products is now something Google does; it is a behavior they are now strongly associated with.
In terms of influencers, it's not about the individual product, it's about the behavior of the company that operated it. Don't piss off the people that give you free advertising by taking out features they like, even if they're the only ones who use them.
>> a product no one knew existed
While I find that a stretch, the point the article was making is that no one needs to know of the existence of Reader for this to have a negative impact on Google. Except for the influencers, who did.
As an average Joe, I am preparing to go on Google-free diet come July 1. Firefox, Bing, Outlook. Will find a reader somehow. These are the daily habits which accumulate over time and provide GOOGLE what it needs to survive. So will do everything possible to cut down the ...
They can't have anything holding Google from becoming what they think Facebook should be.
In fact, they don't just want to become/defeat Facebook, but also Apple (see Nexus/Chromebook) and Amazon (see Shopping Express), not to mention Groupon (see Offers). By trying to be all things, they will become none.
They are on the path to becoming Microsoft. I desperately hope that the Glass/Driverless-car part of the company prevails in corporate culture. I fear that will not be the case.
Now they'd do things to be profitable first, and cool as a side effect.
It's arguable which iterative path leads to a greater market social and market impact.
Sounds more like Yahoo to me.
Google cancelled a product. It let you read websites quickly. There are other ways to do it. Moving on...
I know lots of companies rely on and pay for GMail, I'm sure it won't be discontinued anytime soon, but I'm also sure this event puts thoughts in the back of many people's minds about that eventuality.
I think Google's better move would have been cut a few features and 'Plus-ify' Reader - kinda like they have been doing with their other products. They would have evolved an important user base, shown commitment to the RSS standard, and kept a number of important apps using their api's.
Aren't they after all supposed to be championing the open web?
I don't think this is intentional, but it now hard to argue againsT people saying that they intentionally waited till they killed the RSS readers market and then shut down their product.
"Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars?
Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields.
The lesson they learned correctly was that focus is essential. RSS is dead. A handful of nerds enjoy it, it solves a handful of problems, but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
So they cut it and they're not even going to notice it in the rearview mirror.
In an amusing, if anecdotal, aside – Gina Trapani, an OG nerd influencer if ever there was one, tweeted that she'd checked out of Google Reader long ago.
https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280
Yeah, tell me more about Aaron "Schwartz."
What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles?
RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user.
It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.
Indeed,
> but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.
Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."
What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.
To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search.
If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem.
Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"
To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.
Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.
Aren't you a charmer.
I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow.
And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface.
It's a damn good moat.
Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.
Search is the moat for me. Switching email is not nearly as big of a deal.
I am sad Google is getting out of this market, since that brings me inconvenience of migration. But I'm sure the niche will be filled in.
Google's dominance in search has nothing to do with customer switching costs. They are dominant because, imperfections and privacy issues aside, they legitimately have the best performing search engine on the market. They are able to retain this position because search is an extremely difficult and resource intensive technical problem (like mapping), that nobody has been able to credibly challenge them on since they took over.
If someone builds a better search engine than google, then yes, their position will be precarious, regardless of the other ways they've roped people in. But none of the current crop of competitors give any reason to believe this is imminent.
While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store.
I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain.
That probably won't be the case any more.
So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer.
This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone
Maybe my point is better illustrated by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495
I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.
What?
But I don't think the future will belong neither to Google+ nor Facebook. I'm looking forward to a descentralized, user centric platform, that anyone can run on its raspberry pi box at home, that allows you to manage your data however you please.
So what are the good alternatives to Blogger? And what if you have multiple blogs with hundreds of posts in them? Reader at least is emphemeral, there's no investment of work at risk.
And it's not a peripheral service like Blogger. Automattic is WordPress.com, and all their peripheral products exist to serve it. The best part? You can take your WordPress.com and turn it into an identical WordPress.org with a billion different service providers.
* http://misc.si.umich.edu/media/papers/wsdm333w-bakshy.pdf
* http://www.digitaltonto.com/wp-content/uploads/WattsandDoddi...
"Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web," the book by Paul Adams @ Facebook (http://www.amazon.com/Grouped-groups-friends-influence-socia...), talks a bit about this.
Anecdotally, I've also seen quite a bit of evidence first hand that suggests the impact of influencers is not clear-cut.
It's my homepage and I'm sure millions of other people's homepages. Setting your homepage to an internet company's site is pretty much their whole goal. It's insane to me that they will give this up.
That always felt hokey to me. I was always more likely to "homepage" a website that just gave me great content and proportionately less likely to "homepage" a site that wanted to be my home page. This is why HN/reddit are basically this for me.
My nameless millions and I no longer have a 'homepage' - the browser just starts with the tabs I had open last time.
They aren't going to be benevolent dictators of the internet forever - we should be thankful that their benevolence has lasted so long (and still is lasting through many free services provided).