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This has probably been said 100 times already on 100 other HN threads, but so what? Quit the whining. I have been using Reader for years, and I'm mildly disappo

by ufmace 14y ago

This has probably been said 100 times already on 100 other HN threads, but so what? Quit the whining. I have been using Reader for years, and I'm mildly disappointing that they're closing it. I know perfectly well that there will be a dozen solid replacements that probably have more features before Reader actually dies. That's the way the tech world works - services close all the time for any number of reasons. None of them is all that special, though - if the service genuinely added value for lots of people, then there will be replacements, and if there isn't one, then make one yourself and bask in the profitability. If you're that upset about it, then what do you really want from the tech world? A world where no service is ever killed or changed in a way that makes it less useful to you? We wouldn't have all of the awesome stuff that we have now if thousands of companies weren't willing to kill or change stuff that was unprofitable and take a chance on something new. At least Google is being pretty nice about it - we have months of notice and easy ways to get our feed lists out of Reader. They could have just up and pulled the plug without telling anyone or giving anyone a chance to get data out. Lots of services have been killed in just that way before. Personally, I'm waiting a few weeks for all of the other services to settle down and get used to the massive traffic influx. After that, I expect I'll find something better than Reader and get used to that. And then that will be killed someday too, and I'll have to find yet another thing. Life goes on.

ghshephard 14y ago
A lot of people just don't want to go the hassle of discovering, learning and configuring new tools. If I look at my daily toolset - between social networking, document management/creation, task tracking, work tools - I have on the order of 40 - 50 different tools. Each one of those tools has taken me some amount of effort to really come up to speed on so that I'm productive. For example - I use Evernote for tracking meetings, and I use Omnifocus for personal task tracking. It took me 6-10 hours to learn the ins and outs of each of those tools - and I'm pretty happy with the way they work for me. More importantly, I'm reasonably certain that both of those tools/services will be around several years from now, so I can continue to use them, track my tasks, without having to pick up a new tool. This concept of tool persistence is really important and valuable for a certain segment of the population - and I think it's what Om is expressing here. He doesn't really trust that Google will persist their attention to "Keep", because they've started shutting down other popular services after a few years, so what's to prevent them from doing the same thing with "Keep". He'll stick with evernote, and I can understand why. It's really an attempt to make it clear why Evernote should be successful in the face of an attack by Google.

by ufmace 14y ago

ghshephard 14y ago

A lot of people just don't want to go the hassle of discovering, learning and configuring new tools. If I look at my daily toolset - between social networking, document management/creation, task tracking, work tools - I have on the order of 40 - 50 different tools. Each one of those tools has taken me some amount of effort to really come up to speed on so that I'm productive. For example - I use Evernote for tracking meetings, and I use Omnifocus for personal task tracking. It took me 6-10 hours to learn the ins and outs of each of those tools - and I'm pretty happy with the way they work for me. More importantly, I'm reasonably certain that both of those tools/services will be around several years from now, so I can continue to use them, track my tasks, without having to pick up a new tool. This concept of tool persistence is really important and valuable for a certain segment of the population - and I think it's what Om is expressing here. He doesn't really trust that Google will persist their attention to "Keep", because they've started shutting down other popular services after a few years, so what's to prevent them from doing the same thing with "Keep". He'll stick with evernote, and I can understand why. It's really an attempt to make it clear why Evernote should be successful in the face of an attack by Google.