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> This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad. No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.
by brazzy 14y ago
> This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad.
No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.
- alecdbrooks 14y agoRight. The problem is that there was a monoculture. Without competing alternatives, innovation stops and the product with a monopoly becomes a single point of failure.
- nekgrim 14y agoI think there is no innovation because : - RSS is a thing from the past. It has no "new and shiny" aspect. - RSS is less used than email, so people are focusing on improving emails, not RSS. - Reader was great, and did everything geeks want. Why try to improve something perfect? - + "it is Google, Google will never kill it, because Google guys are geeks too, like us" myth.
- zanny 14y agoI don't get it, what is supposed to be "new and shiny" about "here is an RSS feed, it will provide dated articles of content to consume from a web source, browse at your leisure". It does its job. It is the only thing on the Internet that does that job. It is the definition of a perfect product... because it just works. And email is in the same class. Rich text formatted letters between individuals. I don't see how you want to "improve" that either, because it does its job right. I do agree Reader did the job and therefor didn't have room to improve. Then again, I don't like all the social parts of feeds, I just want my content in a time ordered list of chunks that I can consume at my leisure. RSS does that just fine.
- zoowar 14y agoThere are plenty of alternative readers http://blog.superfeedr.com/state-of-readers/ http://blog.superfeedr.com/state-of-readers/
- alecdbrooks 14y agoI know, I use one myself -- I meant that Google Reader was so dominant that the competition was much weaker than it could have been, and in some cases the alternatives aren't actually competition because they rely on Google Reader.
- nekgrim 14y agoFeedly is creating an alternate API. Press (on Android) updates its app, saying that it will not go down. It's a double problem: Google Reader was good, AND was also a good API. At least, Google Takeout is working, and giving us all our data.
- eykanal 14y agoI think his argument is that "paid" beats "free" because paid can support, whereas free is by definition relying on other revenue (advertising, other paid products) to support it. When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad" comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e., risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if it was, you should be in business there). Whether this applies to Google, I'm on the fence.
- streptomycin 14y agoA company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial.
- gwern 14y agoMy problem with the countless thousands of people who are taking this opportunity to gloat using that argument is that they basically are assuming their conclusion, since their argument goes something like this: "Paid services are less likely to shut down. Google Reader was not paid, therefore Reader was not less likely to shut down. Google Reader shut down, providing more evidence for this claim. We-told-you-so!" But where does the original claim get its support? Are paid services less likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes, paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service, all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust Google! We-told-you-so!').
- jeremyjh 14y agoCan you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality, useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service - since that is what the people are paying for.