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His assumption only requires the group that's replacing Google Reader to have been aware of and involved in the effort to replace Google Reader. Which seems pr
by roc 14y ago
His assumption only requires the group that's replacing Google Reader to have been aware of and involved in the effort to replace Google Reader.
Which seems pretty reasonable.
- javajosh 14y agoThere is a much simpler explanation: the lead of one project is looking to improve his project however he can. In this case, he sees the ruckus over Reader as a chance to get a bunch of feature requests. It's kind of like a vulture picking over a carcass, but hey, circle of life and all that. It's important to remember that to Google products like Reader are blips on the radar. Every second they spent scheming about Reader cost them millions in Ad Sense revenue; hence, there was no scheming.
- roc 14y agoI would find it difficult to believe that Google+ wouldn't have already been looking into getting news feed subscriptions into their product. An RSS-style solution with discoverability would leap-frog Facebook's News stuff and could even put them into quasi-competition with Twitter. It seems an inevitable sort of feature. So the idea that they were surprised by this and are going to start from zero to build a new bit of G+ seems... a stretch.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- chc 14y agoYou seem to be disagreeing with a thing nobody said. It is possible that they were already exploring a news feed feature and that they see this as an opportunity to find out what their users want from the feature.
- roc 14y agoWhat I'm disagree with, is the idea that there must be some overarching Google Unimind for this to have been a conscious strategy, and thus that angle is implausible-to-laughable. I assert it's rather more plausible that such plans were under-way and closing Reader was a step to clear the way for a Google+ solution. Because nothing near a unimind would have been required to coordinate it and because the entire migration is more inevitable than not. Is it possible the Google+ team is sincere in wanting to help people and capture feedback? Sure. But that's rather orthogonal to the question of whether this statement and the timing of all this is primarily motivated by PR strategy.
- pazimzadeh 14y agoOr he could just meet with whoever was in charge of Google Reader, down the street.
- saraid216 14y agoYou realize this person almost certainly doesn't exist, right?
- pazimzadeh 14y agoNo, seriously can you elucidate? He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoOnce Reader lost favor inside the 'plex people didn't want to work on it because it wouldn't show well on their resume. (you don't get promoted for applying CPR to a dead product and manage to keep it alive in intensive care for another budget cycle). So there were no doubt people who were working on other projects who had previously worked on Reader sometimes fixing bugs, and there was probably a product manager somewhere that had at one time been responsible for it, and kind of still remembered where the files were in the source tree. But as a "product" it could continue to exist in Google with nobody "in charge" of it. Its hard to believe, and even harder to explain to someone who hasn't be on the inside, but there are things that exist as Google "products" or "features" only because nobody turned them off, but there is no one at the wheel any more.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoWell, that sounds dysfunctional.
- snaky 14y agoOK, you don't get promoted etc. But promotion isn't one and only motivation, right? For two years there wasn't one Google employee who added one feature to Google Reader just for fun? Ouch.
- scott_s 14y agoIt assumes that those who are responsible for replacing Reader were part of the decision that it was going away. In large companies, the people who decide such things are often not the same people who engineer them.