4 ms·

No, seriously can you elucidate? He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Once 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 ago
  Well, that sounds dysfunctional.
- snaky 14y ago
  OK, 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.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I reiterate :-) its hard to explain for folks on the outside. There are so many shiny toys inside of Google that yes, you could easily go 2, 3, even 5 years before you even thought to yourself "Hmm, I wonder if we could make Reader do this ..." More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling." Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Once 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) Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.
saraid216 14y ago
It's fairly common knowledge that Reader had zero support inside Google, and hasn't had any support in several years.
- Digit-Al 14y ago
  It seems to me that it didn't need much in the way of support. I have been using it for several years and have never experienced so much as a glitch. That could be down to excellent support, of course, but to me it seemed a mature product that could have been left to run exactly as is for any length of time and nobody would have complained. I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    I don't disagree, but that seems to get into the gray area where we don't have enough information. Some of the other Google discontinuations were attributed to bandwidth usage in excess of any possible revenue mechanism. (I'm not aware of whether or not that was debunked, either?) Was that the case here? No idea. It seems plausible that Reader uses more bandwidth than Translate would. Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product. There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.

Once 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 ago
Well, that sounds dysfunctional.
snaky 14y ago
OK, 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.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I reiterate :-) its hard to explain for folks on the outside. There are so many shiny toys inside of Google that yes, you could easily go 2, 3, even 5 years before you even thought to yourself "Hmm, I wonder if we could make Reader do this ..." More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling." Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
CamperBob2 14y ago
Once 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) Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.

saraid216 14y ago

It's fairly common knowledge that Reader had zero support inside Google, and hasn't had any support in several years.

Digit-Al 14y ago
It seems to me that it didn't need much in the way of support. I have been using it for several years and have never experienced so much as a glitch. That could be down to excellent support, of course, but to me it seemed a mature product that could have been left to run exactly as is for any length of time and nobody would have complained. I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I don't disagree, but that seems to get into the gray area where we don't have enough information. Some of the other Google discontinuations were attributed to bandwidth usage in excess of any possible revenue mechanism. (I'm not aware of whether or not that was debunked, either?) Was that the case here? No idea. It seems plausible that Reader uses more bandwidth than Translate would. Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product. There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.