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This isn't regression: it's progress. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing. There is an implicit assum
by polemic 14y ago
This isn't regression: it's progress. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing.
There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth' of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or unsuitable to break through to a wider market.
Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of "alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.
- ryanholiday 14y agoThat's why I liked Siegler's analogy to bees.
- devindotcom 14y agoSo, "good" isn't enough, sure. But how do you define what is enough? What's "good" for someone else - the ones who matter, I guess? The problem is that we've gotten used to the idea that on the internet, the good of someone else doesn't have to interfere with our own good. Two tools, or two thousand, can live in, if not harmony, than in safely compartmentalized areas where their unloved niche can live in peace. That used be what we called progress - that was using the strength of the net to create a productively pluralistic online world. I think your definitions of progress and good are not accurate, or concrete. But I could be misunderstanding you.
- greenranger 14y agoI agree. The article doesn't seem to consider that ultimately it is the mass market that decides which problems aren't trivial. Not everything that can be done on the Web is worth doing, or in other words, not everyone is going to care enough to make an idea sustainable.
- marssaxman 14y ago"Worth doing" in a strictly commercial sense, perhaps, but part of what traditionally made the internet awesome was that it wasn't all about commerce.
- Lagged2Death 14y agoAlerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it wasn't worth doing. If you reduce everything down to commercial viability, then art isn't worth doing, music isn't worth doing, healing the impoverished isn't worth doing and frankly your comment wasn't worth typing, if you come right down to it, was it?
- polemic 14y agoAh, so Alerts and Reader is like healing the impoverished. Clearly, I'm against all those things too! Nice strawman there. Google is a company, and if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up".
- Lagged2Death 14y agoI have no idea what you're against. I don't care what you're against. If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing." Is this not clear? ...if you read the post, it was specifically about "how quickly would VC firms throw MILLIONS at it to scale it up". It is not. One of the reasons Google gave for not opening up the source of reader was that it was too closely tied to their web indexing infrastructure. In other words, Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world. In other words, the replacements for Reader will assuredly be inferior. But that's "progress," you say. If everything that happens is "progress" then we're living in the best of all possible worlds, right?
- polemic 14y agoFirst you say: > If you decide that anything a company isn't doing or stops doing must therefore be "not worth doing," you're going to wind up concluding a lot of things aren't "worth doing." And then: > Google - and Google alone - was uniquely positioned to make the most efficient, highest-performance RSS reader in the world. In other words: the company that was uniquely positioned to make the best RSS reader, found that it wasn't worth doing. So, yeah, I'm going to call it. The idea, which seems good, is fundamentally flawed. Progress is not "just keeping doing what we've been doing for a while because some people feel pretty strongly that we should keep doing it". Progress is recognizing the failures, culling off the dead flesh and seeing what grows in it's place. Time for the next thing.
- jsankey 14y agoWere they really not worth doing? Or just not worth Google doing? The latter has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print money. I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.
- jzawodn 14y agoYou've hit the nail squarely on the head...
- polemic 14y agoI think you're right, but I think it also shows that the service will always be niche. That's fine, but it's not "regression".
- ebertx 14y agoI agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that reduces the number of delivered ads?
- ryanholiday 14y agoDing ding! Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.