4 ms·

> make it a paid service instead Taking a pure business centric view - We're not google's customers, advertisers are. If we paid for the service we would expec

by piqufoh 13y ago

> make it a paid service instead Taking a pure business centric view - We're not google's customers, advertisers are. If we paid for the service we would expect no advertising - and so google's customers would lose.

tempestn 13y ago
If Google was already making that kind of money purely from ads Reader, then the rest of my reasoning stands. Just hire a handful of engineers to maintain it full time and enjoy raking in millions of dollars a year for many years. The fact that they shut it down suggests that it wasn't making millions of dollars from ads, so why not remove them and charge for it instead? As I said, the only real barrier would appear to be the reaction, which could be solved with a bit of manipulation, in fact spinning it into a PR positive. I suspect the answer is that a few millions dollars a year is considered pocket change by Google, insufficient to waste time on. To me that reasoning seems shortsighted. Again though, it's likely that Larry Page's sight is in fact much longer than mine.
Shooti 13y ago
Maybe, but Google have plenty of tactical products which only have an indirect at best business model. Reader shutdown seems more a case of management vision. Under Page's reorg there are now 5 consumer facing units: 1. Knowledge (Search, Maps, News, etc) 2. Social (Google+, Blogger etc) 3. Chrome, Android, Apps 4. Youtube 5. Ads and Commerce Most natural fit would be 1) or 2), but evidently neither Knowledge or Social wanted to pick it up. That leaves 3) as the remaining possibility through a merger with Currents, but that units already spreading itself thin. In the end I think they really wanted to recapture the server cycles since even at Google's scale caching every single feed and creating a searchable index for each user is expensive (for this reason none of the online replacements are able to offer search so far). They probably saw Reader as taking too many resources for its relative impact, and we know from the former product teams comments that even while work on it was still active the upper management was was never really all that effused about it at the time. Page's views didn't change after he took over so it was really just a question of when not why.

by piqufoh 13y ago

tempestn 13y ago

If Google was already making that kind of money purely from ads Reader, then the rest of my reasoning stands. Just hire a handful of engineers to maintain it full time and enjoy raking in millions of dollars a year for many years. The fact that they shut it down suggests that it wasn't making millions of dollars from ads, so why not remove them and charge for it instead? As I said, the only real barrier would appear to be the reaction, which could be solved with a bit of manipulation, in fact spinning it into a PR positive. I suspect the answer is that a few millions dollars a year is considered pocket change by Google, insufficient to waste time on. To me that reasoning seems shortsighted. Again though, it's likely that Larry Page's sight is in fact much longer than mine.

Shooti 13y ago

Maybe, but Google have plenty of tactical products which only have an indirect at best business model. Reader shutdown seems more a case of management vision. Under Page's reorg there are now 5 consumer facing units: 1. Knowledge (Search, Maps, News, etc) 2. Social (Google+, Blogger etc) 3. Chrome, Android, Apps 4. Youtube 5. Ads and Commerce Most natural fit would be 1) or 2), but evidently neither Knowledge or Social wanted to pick it up. That leaves 3) as the remaining possibility through a merger with Currents, but that units already spreading itself thin. In the end I think they really wanted to recapture the server cycles since even at Google's scale caching every single feed and creating a searchable index for each user is expensive (for this reason none of the online replacements are able to offer search so far). They probably saw Reader as taking too many resources for its relative impact, and we know from the former product teams comments that even while work on it was still active the upper management was was never really all that effused about it at the time. Page's views didn't change after he took over so it was really just a question of when not why.