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I don't understand why people are so buttburt about Google Reader. Google's business is to make money, directly or in-directly. G-Reader didn't make much money
by pavs 13y ago
I don't understand why people are so buttburt about Google Reader.
Google's business is to make money, directly or in-directly.
G-Reader didn't make much money, they tried advertising, it didn't work. Turns out people who use RSS, also tends to be tech savvy (a very small portion of overall internet users), people who are tech savvy are less likely to click on ads.
So they don't make any money from it directly, and I can't think of many indirect ways they could make a sizeable amount of money from tech-savvy users. They could start charging small amount per month, and as much as everyone said AFTER google decided to shut it down that they would be willing to pay for a paid service; I suspect in reality most would have just moved to another free service.
Another reason why it makes sense that google decided to shut it down, because now they have Social Site, Google+, from a business point of view it makes more sense for them if rss readers just subscribe to those site on G+. Less fragmentation and all that. I don't necessarily like it, but it makes sense from their point of view.
As to their delivery service. IF it actually turns out to be a serious business venture beyond testing the waters. I suspect, this would start making them money from very early days, if it really picks up that is. It has also the added bonus of knowing name, address, shopping habits of individuals. I would suspect, even if they don't make much money from delivery, those alone would be immensely valuable for Google and their advertisers.
Compare to that, an RSS reader seems like minor inconvenience for google. There is no comparison at all.
- DanBC 13y ago> I don't understand why people are so buttburt about Google Reader. Could Google have open-sourced it, and allowed other people to run the server side stuff on non-google servers?
- pavs 13y agoThey could, but they don't have any obligation to. How many of their online service they shut down was eventually open-sourced? I can't think of any. Also there are other things to consider, we know that Greader was running on auto-pilot for a long time, and the people who worked on it are either not with Google any more or are working on some other project. In order for them to open source this project, they either had to get those people back to help them opensource it or they would have to get new people to run down the whole codebase and take out portions that can be potential security/vulnerability issue. Looks like to me thats a lot of work. There are tons of free and open-source RSS readers out there, some are pretty darn good. Why bother?