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"It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people." Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project"

"It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people." Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses. It's hard for most of us to comprehend, but ready-made revenues of a few million bucks, even if it was $100M (unlikely), is not of interest to Google unless it's growing fast. Which RSS, isn't. Welcome to Extremistan. Black Swans like Google do things that aren't intuitive. "The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability" Yes. This is indeed the direction Google has been moving, and it's a problem for those of us who enjoyed an open web, as users and developers. Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down. They tried with other standards too, e.g. PubSubHubbub, WebFinger. Most people have never heard of them. There's no conspiracy theory needed here. Google tried with Reader too, for 8 years. It just didn't take off. Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier. Not the kind of people who read HN, but the kind of people who are too busy to figure out what seem like trivial technologies to early adopter types. So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running. All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. For a giant company focused on growth, that's all the reason you need to turn it off.

nemesisj 13y ago
"Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses." You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to. Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)? If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high. Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps. All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.
- mmahemoff 13y ago
  It'd be manageable if Reader was the only small project they kept going, but not if there are dozens of them, and there have been dozens of them. Reader is only one example among many small projects which Google has been shutting down. Some might protest that Reader should be the exception, but Google is the only one with the numbers, and I do believe Reader's popularity has been amplified by the nature of its loyal users. It's unlikely a complaint from a disgruntled SketchUp user is going to the top of HN. "Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now" Most of my non-technical family and friends haven't even heard of Reader and aren't aware of its shutdown. OTOH If Reader had some security leak that caused people's GMails to be read, they'd certainly hear about it and Google's seniors would be hauled into Congress or the EU to explain themselves. At risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I don't believe Google has lost its way when you look at their performance over the past couple of years. If stock price is any indication, the all-time high (at a time when its rivals have been flat or in decline) suggests the market doesn't feel that way either.
  - nemesisj 13y ago
    The great thing about hypotheticals is we can make them without a basis in reality. Your hypothetical regarding some Gmail leak is not really reasonable. The fact is, many many Google services don't make money in and of themselves. But they add value to the broader ecosystem as a whole. Whether Google wanted to shut their service down is their business, but the weird machinations that have been trotted out to justify (senior management time, legal and technical risk, reputational risk) are really bizarre when taken within the broader context of how Google does and should operate.
    - mmahemoff 13y ago
      It's not hypothetical. It's a real risk. You know, like a possible outcome has a certain estimated probability of occurring. Risk analysis is one of the things companies do when they make decisions. No-one is justifying here. This is just a conjecture about why it's in their interest to shut it down, contrary to impassioned arguments about how much money they could make to keep it. It's not a "justification" because no moral dimension has been mentioned here.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
> All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. As someone who never used Google Reader and therefore doesn't really care either way about it, I can live with that, because the article raises points that strike me as generally true, and are discussed to rarely for my taste. > Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier You said this about Google Reader, but I'd like to take it out of context and go on a tangent (because when all you have is an off-road bike, everything looks like a ramp :D) I don't think anyone denies that literacy is really important, some would call it a human right, or at least something deriving from human rights. But what would constitute "literacy in the information age"? Or maybe even "just" "web literacy"? Being able to sign up to Facebook? Being able to write HTML and CSS? Being able to code a little, enough to be able to discern cool projects from total charlatans? Being able to code well enough to do anything they could possibly want their computer to do, and to contribute to the pool from which they took in however small ways? I don't know where to exactly draw the line, but I am positive that signing up for Facebook is not enough (regardless of what Facebook might tell people, duh). It's easy, but it leads nowhere, or not very far. It is akin to having someone read and write for you, instead of ever learning it. Perfectly acceptable in the short run, when there is no other choice, but pathetic, a complete no-no, in the long run. Our society would be even more of a cold, dark cellar without widespread literacy. Not that everyone reads, but most people at least could if they wanted to, sometimes they do when it's necessary, and that helps. With that in mind, I worry about how naively we treat this brave new computerized world. There is this quote that predates the web but which the web constantly makes me think of, and which I believe goes hand in hand with another one: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker (14 May 1960) "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." -- George Orwell Yes, not being able to think is easier. I know, I've been there. But only in the short run, in the long run it makes everything impossibly hard. The web as we know it, isn't even two decades old, and we already act all wise about it, that "that's just how it is". Yet we didn't give up on literacy for hundreds of years, if not millenia. If anyone today suggested that hey, wouldn't it be kinda okay if most people couldn't read, as long as the others made sure they select the best books to read to them from...? they'd be laughed out of any group of people. Most people on the planet older than 10 would see through that. It took us so long to get here, but damnit, here we are. I don't see how computers are different, other than currently being mostly pushed and therefore being held hostage by motives of greed, consumerism and distraction, and our own shallow desire for instant gratification. But those motives are like clouds in the wind, in the way they are manifested they're rather a zit that grew in an unclean spot, than a "law of nature"... while computation and communication are hard facts that will not go anywhere ever, until the very end of the universe, or at least the end of life in it. Whoever obstructed literacy in history is now dust and their motives forgotten, whatever temporary advantage over others it gained them they lost - but literacy remains, and the gratitude to those who teached others with patience and creativity will never waver or diminish. Again, I don't see how computers are different. Not everybody is Shakespeare, and not everybody has to be Carmack, but that doesn't mean to just leave it to the "experts". Kicking out the ladder under you and being the middleman for what you found in the tree is a game old as dirt, and I think one nice step to help improving the physical world would be to stop repeating its worst mistakes in the "virtual" one. /end rant.. no, wait: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein
cabalamat 13y ago
> Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses. If that was the case, couldn't Google have sold the site to someone else, instead of scrapping it?
- arkem 13y ago
  The amount of effort to decouple Reader from Google's internal infrastructure is not trivial. I'm an engineer and not a business person but I imagine that finding someone to buy Reader and then executing the deal would also be non-trivial.
ambiate 13y ago
"So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running." Glass is following the same route. With the delay of the GDK, Glassware is the current development route. It is just a REST protocol on a limited 1,000 requests per day. I imagine the GDK will not surface until they are satisfied with the results from the audience.
davidedicillo 13y ago
My problem with Google isn't that they behave like a business because they are. My problem is that they keep feeding us all this BS about being open and about doing it for our own good.
vineet 13y ago
> Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, ... Yes, they did try open standards. However, the reason it failed was not (IMO) because open standards were a bad idea. The Open Standard initiatives failed at Google because they did not really know how to do UX. They have only recently started to figure it out. (I would argue that Google+ is significantly better than OpenSocial ever was, and Google needs to improve it even further)

nemesisj 13y ago

"Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses." You know, I've seen this statement on almost every thread about Google Reader, and it seems to be one of those things that everyone is just giving a pass to. Google's entire hiring and organisational model is (or at least should be) predicated on hiring great people to get things done. This is how every well run technical company operates. This idea that we all need "senior management attention" or "product manager" love is something that comes out of dysfunctional organisations without a shared vision. Could you imagine this statement being made about some of the tech company darlings here (37Signals, Github, Stripe etc.)? If you're going to put a product in maintenance mode (or even slow growth) with a team who understands it, you don't need senior management attention from on high. Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now - that's not going to go away any time soon and you better believe that it was much worse than someone coming along later and saying "Oh no, Google reader is so unchanged from 3 years ago, I hate Google." Anecdotally, I don't even know anyone who uses Google Reader directly, they all have dedicated apps. All these arguments are poor. Or, at best, if they're true, they signal that Google has really lost its way - it's now a behemoth organisation that requires senior management oversight on every single product offering, and any non-spectacular product could at any instant bring the entire organisation down with its combination of toxic legal and toxic risk.

mmahemoff 13y ago
It'd be manageable if Reader was the only small project they kept going, but not if there are dozens of them, and there have been dozens of them. Reader is only one example among many small projects which Google has been shutting down. Some might protest that Reader should be the exception, but Google is the only one with the numbers, and I do believe Reader's popularity has been amplified by the nature of its loyal users. It's unlikely a complaint from a disgruntled SketchUp user is going to the top of HN. "Also, the reputational risk is just a laughable statement to make. Look what happened reputationally just now" Most of my non-technical family and friends haven't even heard of Reader and aren't aware of its shutdown. OTOH If Reader had some security leak that caused people's GMails to be read, they'd certainly hear about it and Google's seniors would be hauled into Congress or the EU to explain themselves. At risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I don't believe Google has lost its way when you look at their performance over the past couple of years. If stock price is any indication, the all-time high (at a time when its rivals have been flat or in decline) suggests the market doesn't feel that way either.
- nemesisj 13y ago
  The great thing about hypotheticals is we can make them without a basis in reality. Your hypothetical regarding some Gmail leak is not really reasonable. The fact is, many many Google services don't make money in and of themselves. But they add value to the broader ecosystem as a whole. Whether Google wanted to shut their service down is their business, but the weird machinations that have been trotted out to justify (senior management time, legal and technical risk, reputational risk) are really bizarre when taken within the broader context of how Google does and should operate.
  - mmahemoff 13y ago
    It's not hypothetical. It's a real risk. You know, like a possible outcome has a certain estimated probability of occurring. Risk analysis is one of the things companies do when they make decisions. No-one is justifying here. This is just a conjecture about why it's in their interest to shut it down, contrary to impassioned arguments about how much money they could make to keep it. It's not a "justification" because no moral dimension has been mentioned here.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

> All of this is related to Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. As someone who never used Google Reader and therefore doesn't really care either way about it, I can live with that, because the article raises points that strike me as generally true, and are discussed to rarely for my taste. > Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier You said this about Google Reader, but I'd like to take it out of context and go on a tangent (because when all you have is an off-road bike, everything looks like a ramp :D) I don't think anyone denies that literacy is really important, some would call it a human right, or at least something deriving from human rights. But what would constitute "literacy in the information age"? Or maybe even "just" "web literacy"? Being able to sign up to Facebook? Being able to write HTML and CSS? Being able to code a little, enough to be able to discern cool projects from total charlatans? Being able to code well enough to do anything they could possibly want their computer to do, and to contribute to the pool from which they took in however small ways? I don't know where to exactly draw the line, but I am positive that signing up for Facebook is not enough (regardless of what Facebook might tell people, duh). It's easy, but it leads nowhere, or not very far. It is akin to having someone read and write for you, instead of ever learning it. Perfectly acceptable in the short run, when there is no other choice, but pathetic, a complete no-no, in the long run. Our society would be even more of a cold, dark cellar without widespread literacy. Not that everyone reads, but most people at least could if they wanted to, sometimes they do when it's necessary, and that helps. With that in mind, I worry about how naively we treat this brave new computerized world. There is this quote that predates the web but which the web constantly makes me think of, and which I believe goes hand in hand with another one: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker (14 May 1960) "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." -- George Orwell Yes, not being able to think is easier. I know, I've been there. But only in the short run, in the long run it makes everything impossibly hard. The web as we know it, isn't even two decades old, and we already act all wise about it, that "that's just how it is". Yet we didn't give up on literacy for hundreds of years, if not millenia. If anyone today suggested that hey, wouldn't it be kinda okay if most people couldn't read, as long as the others made sure they select the best books to read to them from...? they'd be laughed out of any group of people. Most people on the planet older than 10 would see through that. It took us so long to get here, but damnit, here we are. I don't see how computers are different, other than currently being mostly pushed and therefore being held hostage by motives of greed, consumerism and distraction, and our own shallow desire for instant gratification. But those motives are like clouds in the wind, in the way they are manifested they're rather a zit that grew in an unclean spot, than a "law of nature"... while computation and communication are hard facts that will not go anywhere ever, until the very end of the universe, or at least the end of life in it. Whoever obstructed literacy in history is now dust and their motives forgotten, whatever temporary advantage over others it gained them they lost - but literacy remains, and the gratitude to those who teached others with patience and creativity will never waver or diminish. Again, I don't see how computers are different. Not everybody is Shakespeare, and not everybody has to be Carmack, but that doesn't mean to just leave it to the "experts". Kicking out the ladder under you and being the middleman for what you found in the tree is a game old as dirt, and I think one nice step to help improving the physical world would be to stop repeating its worst mistakes in the "virtual" one. /end rant.. no, wait: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein

cabalamat 13y ago

> Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses. If that was the case, couldn't Google have sold the site to someone else, instead of scrapping it?

arkem 13y ago
The amount of effort to decouple Reader from Google's internal infrastructure is not trivial. I'm an engineer and not a business person but I imagine that finding someone to buy Reader and then executing the deal would also be non-trivial.

ambiate 13y ago

"So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in after their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running." Glass is following the same route. With the delay of the GDK, Glassware is the current development route. It is just a REST protocol on a limited 1,000 requests per day. I imagine the GDK will not surface until they are satisfied with the results from the audience.

davidedicillo 13y ago

My problem with Google isn't that they behave like a business because they are. My problem is that they keep feeding us all this BS about being open and about doing it for our own good.

vineet 13y ago

> Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, ... Yes, they did try open standards. However, the reason it failed was not (IMO) because open standards were a bad idea. The Open Standard initiatives failed at Google because they did not really know how to do UX. They have only recently started to figure it out. (I would argue that Google+ is significantly better than OpenSocial ever was, and Google needs to improve it even further)