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Funny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries - newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's innovation. But wh
by mapgrep 14y ago
Funny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries - newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's innovation. But when internet companies do this to one another it's the end of the world (literally described as "the apocalypse").
How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators -- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are whining.
- mattmanser 14y agoHe's saying that non-techies don't realise that Google Reader != RSS. So won't seek an alternative rss product, hence blogs losing lots of readers. The apocolypse refers to that. I suspect that won't happen as plenty of 'alternative to google reader' articles popping up.
- mapgrep 14y agoHe outright says Google ruined the market: "I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services." His last sentence: "This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad." I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google Reader being free.