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Personally, GR is one of few services that I would have gladly paid $100/year for. They should at least have asked us users if we wanted to pay for the service
by skarmklart 13y ago
Personally, GR is one of few services that I would have gladly paid $100/year for. They should at least have asked us users if we wanted to pay for the service in exchange for letting it live on.
- amirmc 13y agoEven then, there probably aren't enough of you to make it worthwhile (and you're not a growing market). Keeping things free gives the provider tremendous leeway to do as they please.
- VMG 13y agoThe blowback on google charging for a formerly free service would have been a magnitude worse than them just shutting it down.
- acdha 13y agoThat's an unproven assertion which the torrent of people saying “I'd have paid for Reader” calls seriously into question.
- VikingCoder 13y agoIt should be trivially easy to look at the Graveyard, and find products that Google cancelled, where someone else later produced a competing product - for pay - that has attracted comparable users. http://pinterest.com/googlegraveyard/google-graveyard/ http://pinterest.com/googlegraveyard/google-graveyard/ People say they would buy things, all the time.
- gwern 13y agoI disagree. As part of writing http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns I read through scads of blog posts, forum threads, articles etc for figuring out which of the ~300 entries were paid; aside from a Google Maps API charge which very quickly blew over and has been forgotten, there were no blowbacks to Google starting to charge for something, much less your incredibly hyperbolic 'magnitude worse' blowback. Reader's shutdown has cost them vastly more than switching to a subscription model ever would have.
- VikingCoder 13y agoPeople yowled at Google App Engine increasing its prices.
- gwern 13y agoYeah? Case in point, you see anyone still bitching about that in front page posts to HN?
- VikingCoder 13y ago"there were no blowbacks to Google" That's a factually incorrect statement. I'm sorry, but people who make factual claims are supposed to care when they're proven wrong.
- gwern 13y agoI am amused by your attempt to shame me into agreeing with you, but some complaining about price increases is not a 'blowback'. Dozens of new readers and business starting up and endless bad PR (I have Google Alerts set up, so I see the new articles all the time, and the Reader is still generating bad press especially now that the shutdown is nigh) - that is blowback.