8 ms·

Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem

83 points by watchdogtimer 14y ago

molecule 14y ago
The speed w/ which Google deployed, and then discontinued Google Buzz discouraged the adoption of Google+ for many folks, myself included. > Launched February 9, 2010 > Current status Discontinued December 15, 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
  - freehunter 14y ago
    At least they open-sourced it and released a stand-alone version via the Apache Foundation. You can still use Wave, it's just called Apache Wave or Wave in a Box.
thomholwerda 14y ago
Google Reader has been active for 8 years. That's longer than most technology products. In addition, there are countless alternatives to choose from, and you can easily get your data out of Reader and move to one of those countless alternatives. This whole thing has been so overblown. It's like everyone is bored or something.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- taligent 14y ago
  I have hundreds of starred articles which unless someone makes a replacement for Google Reader is going to disappear come July. For me it's like losing years worth of bookmarks. And I hope that you post the same thing if/when Google discontinues Google Mail.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    I have a 7.39MB starred.json from my Reader takeout. And Feedly is showing saved articles from over four years ago (long before I tried Feedly the first time), so it probably imported them.
  - egor83 14y ago
    Well, strictly speaking, starred messages are included in OPML bundle that you can download. Even if you don't get complete replacement for GReader, you can still extract information from that file, it's just JSON.
SeanDav 14y ago
Besides search and gmail, I have no intention of ever using another Google offering again. I also now regularly back up up gmail using Thunderbird just in case Google does something stupid there as well.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  Personally, I think if it weren't for Search and Gmail with its tie-in effect, people would have moved out of all other Google services a long time ago. I do not like this new direction Google has taken since the past few product redesigns (Gmail, Google Groups, Image Search among others) where the products have gone from beautifully functional and feature rich to outright broken even for basic features. Groups has become absolutely unusable. The Gmail redesign was a sore point and I customized it to be as close as it could be to the older design, but I expect them to break it further in the future.
lingben 14y ago
really shocking to see the extent of myopia over at google, for 'smart people' they are acting incredibly dumb
- macspoofing 14y ago
  I'd venture to say that this is all Larry Page. The start of this "myopia" seems to coincide with him taking over as CEO.
  - taligent 14y ago
    It actually started when Larry met Steve Jobs and was recommended he focus his efforts. Ever since then it's been all about Google+ and finding new ways to force feed to everyone.
    - yuhong 14y ago
      To be honest, Vic is also to blame for that one too.
      - Evbn 14y ago
        Vic runs G+. It is his job to grow G+. The person who hired him for that job is responsible for deciding whether that job should exist.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Let us now daydream about the possibility that Steve sabotaged Larry.
      - yuhong 14y ago
        Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524
    - lingben 14y ago
      Interesting. Quite possible since the attitude adopted by Larry Page is the same one Jobs reveled in: 'I know better than anyone, even millions of users.' This is in contrast to Google's previous data driven method of decision making.
Shank 14y ago
I'm really starting to get annoyed at the whole "whelp, Google Reader died, therefore everything else is unsafe" mantra being carried by the tech industry as of late. Sure, it was worth mentioning early in the game (and more importantly once), but at this point it's become a bandwagon. The press is declaring Google Reader a sign of things to come, but for the average user this has little effect. If we assume Google wasn't lying, and the users were dropping off, it makes sense for them to cut off a product that wasn't being actively developed in the first place. I'm a Reader fan, and I hate that it shut down, but that's beside the point - Google is trying to build new, better products, not let old ones fester without support or development. This doesn't even tackle the fact that Keep isn't a true Evernote competitor. It's more of a supplement/addition to Evernote. For once, a Gizmodo article is relevant here: http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-google-keep-cant-replace http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-googl...
- taligent 14y ago
  You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API. And there has been this assumption with Google that they would keep their APIs available. Especially for something a innocuous as an RSS API. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
  - Shooti 14y ago
    > You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API. A hacked up, reverse-engineered API. Since it was never official they haven't actually broken any promises.
  - obsession 14y ago
    Google has killed APIs before. Examples include Google Translate and private weather API.
- lukifer 14y ago
  I'd call it less of a bandwagon, and more of a tipping point. Google has killed lots of little services, beloved or otherwise, in addition to all the acquihires by various tech giants. Google Reader has simply become a focal point for the closures of so many beloved products and services, because it's so comparatively ubiquitous that an abundance of nerds and literati are all sharing the same frustration simultaneously. Though I'm also skeptical about trusting new Google products, I think the real lesson is being skeptical in general. If a product isn't part of a company's core business, and/or the business model is unsustainable or user-hostile, go in with eyes open, and ensure you have an exit strategy.
lnanek2 14y ago
Wonder how long until they shut down Keep with everyone having put a lot into using it. We should start a web site for pooling bets...
- mtgx 14y ago
  5 years? Would that be enough? Or do you like using services for life? Especially ones of such little value and little tie-in as a note app. Most people would rather get bored with it and try something new than be upset about Google killing Keep in 5 years.
TillE 14y ago
> and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.' This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the problem at hand. Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's value in diversity.
- olalonde 14y ago
  > Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?
- arindone 14y ago
  It's easy to say that from a philosophical point of view, but it's preposterous from a business point of view. In an organization like theirs working on 1000's of different things at once, you can't keep expanding horizontally; you have to eventually cut your losses on certain things and re-allocate resources to things that DO work and get ROI. Businesses, and pretty much any organized group, MUST prioritize their workload and not have a shit-show working on everything all at once.
cromwellian 14y ago
No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't. That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive. There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones. Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day, only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in oodles of their own internal projects. Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma. IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around? Or Vine? Path? The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them. Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non-transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be. The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al.
erichocean 14y ago
We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the following Google headline: Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain competitiveness and re-ignite growth. Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat! Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday, Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway. Hopefully, it won't be too late.
- nonamegiven 14y ago
  Google swing back? I doubt it. Once they crossed over into a billion+ company, their mission became to be a billion+ company. That they still organize the world's information, or claim to do whatever they did in the past, is just momentum that will bleed off. They make money. That's all they do. Nothing wrong with that, but they're never going to be what they were. Their future is to be General Electric, or Comcast, or HP in their declining years. The difference between HP and Google is acceleration; the days of Bill and Dave are remembered wistfully, as they were not there for the decline and destruction. The days of Page Rank and Labs and excitement are dead and gone, as are the human days of Lestat, never to return.
nell 14y ago
The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.
bsimpson 14y ago
Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum. There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.
- msabalau 14y ago
  There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed. Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because of Apple's behavior. I doubt it. At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type of technology that I expect will be influential. There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead ends. We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as adopters.
hugofirth 14y ago
The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing: The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over-zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the wider user base who look to them for guidance. -------- Their temper tantrum has achieved several things: -------- - Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an unprofessional article by Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to-yourself/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to... - Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback, contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat themselves on the back for 'getting it right'. - Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps, Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap & Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ? - Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either. -------- The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing: -------- - Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google Reader. Some facts to finish off: Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders. It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments. Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments. Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture (G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the weight of their own legacy support. When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too. RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other people ... HMV is still shutting down! -------- I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."
at-fates-hands 14y ago
I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer service or support of their products is horrendous. That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.
deelowe 14y ago
Did everyone forget about this? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...
mark_l_watson 14y ago
Blogger seems like a direct competitor to Google+ Does it seem unrealistic to worry that Google might cut that? It is easy to export data from Blogger to other blogging systems (I just moved off of Blogger), so at least good for Google for making it easy to export data from their products.
Tichy 14y ago
Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services based on open standards. Bashing Google seems silly...
- lmm 14y ago
  I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for whom this is a niche side product.

83 points by watchdogtimer 14y ago

The speed w/ which Google deployed, and then discontinued Google Buzz discouraged the adoption of Google+ for many folks, myself included. > Launched February 9, 2010 > Current status Discontinued December 15, 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

Samuel_Michon 14y ago
For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
- freehunter 14y ago
  At least they open-sourced it and released a stand-alone version via the Apache Foundation. You can still use Wave, it's just called Apache Wave or Wave in a Box.

thomholwerda 14y ago

Google Reader has been active for 8 years. That's longer than most technology products. In addition, there are countless alternatives to choose from, and you can easily get your data out of Reader and move to one of those countless alternatives. This whole thing has been so overblown. It's like everyone is bored or something.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
taligent 14y ago
I have hundreds of starred articles which unless someone makes a replacement for Google Reader is going to disappear come July. For me it's like losing years worth of bookmarks. And I hope that you post the same thing if/when Google discontinues Google Mail.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  I have a 7.39MB starred.json from my Reader takeout. And Feedly is showing saved articles from over four years ago (long before I tried Feedly the first time), so it probably imported them.
- egor83 14y ago
  Well, strictly speaking, starred messages are included in OPML bundle that you can download. Even if you don't get complete replacement for GReader, you can still extract information from that file, it's just JSON.

SeanDav 14y ago

Besides search and gmail, I have no intention of ever using another Google offering again. I also now regularly back up up gmail using Thunderbird just in case Google does something stupid there as well.

manaskarekar 14y ago
Personally, I think if it weren't for Search and Gmail with its tie-in effect, people would have moved out of all other Google services a long time ago. I do not like this new direction Google has taken since the past few product redesigns (Gmail, Google Groups, Image Search among others) where the products have gone from beautifully functional and feature rich to outright broken even for basic features. Groups has become absolutely unusable. The Gmail redesign was a sore point and I customized it to be as close as it could be to the older design, but I expect them to break it further in the future.

lingben 14y ago

really shocking to see the extent of myopia over at google, for 'smart people' they are acting incredibly dumb

macspoofing 14y ago
I'd venture to say that this is all Larry Page. The start of this "myopia" seems to coincide with him taking over as CEO.
- taligent 14y ago
  It actually started when Larry met Steve Jobs and was recommended he focus his efforts. Ever since then it's been all about Google+ and finding new ways to force feed to everyone.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    To be honest, Vic is also to blame for that one too.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Vic runs G+. It is his job to grow G+. The person who hired him for that job is responsible for deciding whether that job should exist.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Let us now daydream about the possibility that Steve sabotaged Larry.
    - yuhong 14y ago
      Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524
  - lingben 14y ago
    Interesting. Quite possible since the attitude adopted by Larry Page is the same one Jobs reveled in: 'I know better than anyone, even millions of users.' This is in contrast to Google's previous data driven method of decision making.

Shank 14y ago

I'm really starting to get annoyed at the whole "whelp, Google Reader died, therefore everything else is unsafe" mantra being carried by the tech industry as of late. Sure, it was worth mentioning early in the game (and more importantly once), but at this point it's become a bandwagon. The press is declaring Google Reader a sign of things to come, but for the average user this has little effect. If we assume Google wasn't lying, and the users were dropping off, it makes sense for them to cut off a product that wasn't being actively developed in the first place. I'm a Reader fan, and I hate that it shut down, but that's beside the point - Google is trying to build new, better products, not let old ones fester without support or development. This doesn't even tackle the fact that Keep isn't a true Evernote competitor. It's more of a supplement/addition to Evernote. For once, a Gizmodo article is relevant here: http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-google-keep-cant-replace http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-googl...

taligent 14y ago
You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API. And there has been this assumption with Google that they would keep their APIs available. Especially for something a innocuous as an RSS API. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
- Shooti 14y ago
  > You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API. A hacked up, reverse-engineered API. Since it was never official they haven't actually broken any promises.
- obsession 14y ago
  Google has killed APIs before. Examples include Google Translate and private weather API.
lukifer 14y ago
I'd call it less of a bandwagon, and more of a tipping point. Google has killed lots of little services, beloved or otherwise, in addition to all the acquihires by various tech giants. Google Reader has simply become a focal point for the closures of so many beloved products and services, because it's so comparatively ubiquitous that an abundance of nerds and literati are all sharing the same frustration simultaneously. Though I'm also skeptical about trusting new Google products, I think the real lesson is being skeptical in general. If a product isn't part of a company's core business, and/or the business model is unsustainable or user-hostile, go in with eyes open, and ensure you have an exit strategy.

lnanek2 14y ago

Wonder how long until they shut down Keep with everyone having put a lot into using it. We should start a web site for pooling bets...

mtgx 14y ago
5 years? Would that be enough? Or do you like using services for life? Especially ones of such little value and little tie-in as a note app. Most people would rather get bored with it and try something new than be upset about Google killing Keep in 5 years.

TillE 14y ago

> and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.' This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the problem at hand. Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's value in diversity.

olalonde 14y ago
> Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?
arindone 14y ago
It's easy to say that from a philosophical point of view, but it's preposterous from a business point of view. In an organization like theirs working on 1000's of different things at once, you can't keep expanding horizontally; you have to eventually cut your losses on certain things and re-allocate resources to things that DO work and get ROI. Businesses, and pretty much any organized group, MUST prioritize their workload and not have a shit-show working on everything all at once.

cromwellian 14y ago

No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't. That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive. There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones. Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day, only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in oodles of their own internal projects. Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma. IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around? Or Vine? Path? The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them. Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non-transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be. The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al.

erichocean 14y ago

We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the following Google headline: Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain competitiveness and re-ignite growth. Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat! Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday, Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway. Hopefully, it won't be too late.

nonamegiven 14y ago
Google swing back? I doubt it. Once they crossed over into a billion+ company, their mission became to be a billion+ company. That they still organize the world's information, or claim to do whatever they did in the past, is just momentum that will bleed off. They make money. That's all they do. Nothing wrong with that, but they're never going to be what they were. Their future is to be General Electric, or Comcast, or HP in their declining years. The difference between HP and Google is acceleration; the days of Bill and Dave are remembered wistfully, as they were not there for the decline and destruction. The days of Page Rank and Labs and excitement are dead and gone, as are the human days of Lestat, never to return.

nell 14y ago

The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.

bsimpson 14y ago

Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum. There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.

msabalau 14y ago
There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed. Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because of Apple's behavior. I doubt it. At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type of technology that I expect will be influential. There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead ends. We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as adopters.

hugofirth 14y ago

The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing: The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over-zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the wider user base who look to them for guidance. -------- Their temper tantrum has achieved several things: -------- - Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an unprofessional article by Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to-yourself/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to... - Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback, contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat themselves on the back for 'getting it right'. - Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps, Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap & Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ? - Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either. -------- The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing: -------- - Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google Reader. Some facts to finish off: Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders. It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments. Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments. Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture (G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the weight of their own legacy support. When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too. RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other people ... HMV is still shutting down! -------- I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."

at-fates-hands 14y ago

I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer service or support of their products is horrendous. That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.

deelowe 14y ago

Did everyone forget about this? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...

mark_l_watson 14y ago

Blogger seems like a direct competitor to Google+ Does it seem unrealistic to worry that Google might cut that? It is easy to export data from Blogger to other blogging systems (I just moved off of Blogger), so at least good for Google for making it easy to export data from their products.

Tichy 14y ago

Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services based on open standards. Bashing Google seems silly...

lmm 14y ago
I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for whom this is a niche side product.