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I'm pretty sure the Google brand is already heavily associated with killing products whenever they feel like it, as they did to Code Search, Google Search API (

• psbp 14y ago
  No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.
  • anon1385 14y ago
    Nobody forced Google to start up all those loss making services -- which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products.
    • atirip 14y ago
      Stifle competiton? Are you serious? All what Google does is destroying other peoples's businesses for fun - see, we have shitload of money and nothing to do, why we just offer that what you offer, but for free - haha looser.
      • riffraff 14y ago
        The fact that google may not be doing doesn't mean this is isn't a known practice, which is actually punished by the law in some places.
      • arrrg 14y ago
        Offering your product for free (which smaller competitors will often not be able to do) can drive the competition out of business and be anti-competitve (i.e. evil). This is not some absurd thing to say. The only question is whether that happened. (I sort of believe it did, at least on some level.) That doesn’t make Google super-evil in my eyes, but it’s a mark against them.
        • icebraining 14y ago
          That's essentially saying that being too competitive is anti-competitive, and frankly, I think it's ridiculous. So what if smaller competitors aren't able to provide the same solutions at the same price? Isn't that why it's called competition? The point is to benefit consumers, not to keep inefficient businesses alive by hurting them. That said, I think there's some sense in calling anti-competitive when a player lowers the price temporarily, in order to drive out competitors and jack up the prices afterwards. But that's clearly not what happened here.
          • arrrg 14y ago
            Nah, reducing the price and bringing it back up is not necessary. It’s anti-competitive if Google Reader on its own wasn’t profitable and Google nevertheless kept it alive (funding it with money from elsewhere in the company), thus killing competitors.
            • icebraining 14y ago
              Then, does that make Hacker News an anti-competitive move by YCombinator? Does it make Free Software anti-competitive? Maybe it is, but then I say, hurray for the anti-competitives!
              • arrrg 14y ago
                No, it doesn’t. This isn’t a black and white problem.
            • arindone 14y ago
    • setrofim_ 14y ago
      >which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products or, less cynically, to try them out and see what interest they would generate; shutting them down when the interest was not sufficiently great.
    • pekk 14y ago
      I think I would rather that companies try things out and then shut them down, rather than never trying anything remotely new or different in extreme fear that they might fail.
  • dsr_ 14y ago
    Luckily, at their current profitability that's unlikely to happen until well after your grandchildren are retired.
  • Dylan16807 14y ago
    Is reader really a money drain? The bulk of it is crawling and serving cached text, which is core to google's search anyway.
  • darkarmani 14y ago
    > No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt. Because that was anyone's argument?
• gwern 14y ago
  And Google Knol!
• smnrchrds 14y ago
  To be fair, Google didn't kill Writely. It now lives as Google Docs. There may be other services in your list that are not entirely dead.