
Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry - iProject
http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-crushed-and-abandoned-the-rss-industry-7000013025/
======
onosendai
The whole article makes for some pretty depressing reading, and touches upon
some important points. For me, the most crucial and eye opening is the stark
contrast of the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005 to what we have
today. You can't help but feel uncomfortable about the whole direction we're
taking with tightly controlled silos of information (Twitter, Facebook, G+,
etc.) using extremely limited, or highly monetized, API access, when you read
something like this:

"One thing that’s definitely coming (and some of these already exist, although
haven’t yet been made public) is extremely deep API support. Our general plan
here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow
folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways."

Google is just as guilty as several other parties of bringing about the
situation we have now. I get the fact that everyone is looking for ways of
increasing revenue, but they're doing it at the expense of openness, instead
of leveraging that openness (see RSS for example) and building services and
added value on top of it.

I hope the death of Reader serves as a wake up call on several fronts.

~~~
bambax
But Twitter doesn't make any money, and Facebook not that much. The bulk of
Google's revenue comes from leveraging the openness of the Web; were there
only Facebooks and Twitters there would be no Google Search because there
would be nothing to index.

This may be completely off, but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate
move to help Google+: since Google can't kill Facebook, they're willing to
hurt themselves instead -- to cut their left arm so that their right arm can
grow stronger.

If this is indeed the case, it's very shortsighted.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"The bulk of Google's revenue comes from leveraging the openness of the Web"_

Does not compute. Google makes its money selling ads. Those ads appear mainly
on Google's website, which is very much closed. Nobody knows how Google comes
up with search results and why specific ads are shown.

 _"were there only Facebooks and Twitters there would be no Google Search
because there would be nothing to index."_

Google existed before social media: before Myspace, before Friendster, even
before LiveJournal. When Google started, 'blog' wasn't even a word and
Geocities was one of the most popular sites on the web. Social media is still
a small part of what happens on the web. But imagine, were there only
Facebooks and Twitters, surely Google would be offering ads there.

~~~
bambax
Google displays ads on search results that are possible because it indexes the
open web. No open web > no index > no search results.

Were there only closed systems, there would be no way of building a
transversal search system.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
If it's displayed on a networked computer, it can be indexed – Facebook and
Twitter can be indexed, it just takes more effort. But let's imagine there
would be no way for Google to index the web, then they would find other places
to put their ads. Google is an advertising company, not an Internet search
company.

~~~
icebraining
_Facebook and Twitter can be indexed, it just takes more effort._

It's not really about effort; it's about the fact that FB & Twitter don't
really want Google indexing them.

 _But let's imagine there would be no way for Google to index the web, then
they would find other places to put their ads._

What makes you think they'd be successful in finding such places?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Google would buy them, like they've bought many such companies before
(YouTube, DoubleClick, AdMob, DejaNews, Zagat, Frommer's, etc).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google)

~~~
unclebucknasty
This may be true, but I think you are turning the discussion in another
direction.

The talk here is of Google's current/primary business model. It is, in fact,
based on the open Web as was stated previously.

Sure, they could buy other properties. But that just implies a changing
business model (ex: content destinations). For that matter you could extend
the argument and say that they might buy Facebook or Twitter.

But the need for them to buy such destinations in order to continue their
advertising business actually itself speaks to the closing of the Web.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
And that's pretty much what Yahoo! Tried to do without so much success.

------
mtgx
Here's another viewpoint. If Google Reader was so good that it made people so
mad about it being shut down, and it was so important in people's lives - then
it must've been a pretty good app, right?

Okay, so even with Reader being _this_ good, the RSS protocol was still dying
because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news. So then if
RSS didn't have a reader that was this good, then it would've probably died a
lot sooner, and Google Reader actually prolonged its life. Without Google
Reader, RSS might have died 2 years ago.

So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill
RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed
that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die,
as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS.

As a side note, I'm someone who consumes a _lot_ of news every day, yet I
still found a service like Reader to quickly become overwhelming, and I've
barely used it occasionally. As we've seen, many of these journalists actually
had thousands if not tens of thousands of unread news stories in their Reader,
which I think is also why not that many people were using it. It felt
overwhelming.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't
> kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never
> crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will
> probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS._

If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly
exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth.

Firefox _used_ to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a
webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that
I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a
while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that.

So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages
use a _gif_ saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always
easy.

It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very _obscure_ feature
of the internet. That halts adoption.

~~~
objclxt
> _Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in
> a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it_

I'm pretty sure Safari did this as well - it was removed in Mountain Lion.

~~~
anoncow
Opera did it too. Opera mini for lowly java feature phones did it too.

------
bborud
One of the things I always wanted to get around to while working for Google
was to borrow some ideas from Gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen's brilliant news reader
for Emacs. (A rewrite of Masanobu Umeda's Gnus)

Gnus has a brilliant system for assigning a score to postings in all sorts of
clever ways. You have the simple stuff, like assigning a negative score to a
given person, but you can also do more subtle stuff like scoring up postings
that are responses to your own postings. It also has various forms of adaptive
scoring.

The score then influenced the ordering of threads, highlighting threads that
need your attention and hiding threads and postings that you do not want to
see. (Most news readers had a bozo-filter that could do the latter, but which
didn't really do any of the former well).

What made Gnus such a great newsreader was that, with the use of scoring, I
could spend 10-15 minutes per day getting an overview of dozens of active
discussions I was having across a bunch of newsgroups. At one point the total
number of postings in the groups I was following was around 6000 postings per
day, and it took me mere minutes to get an overview of what had happened that
was of interest to me.

The idea of scoring applied to RSS feeds would have been brilliant. It would
have made following a massive number of RSS feeds a far more attractive
proposition.

I still think that there is an opportunity to revive RSS and make it relevant
again, but I would recommend that people interested in RSS readers have a
closer look at Gnus first. RSS readers need to do a lot more than just
aggregate and display feeds. There are some great opportunities in figuring
out how to add scoring in a way users can understand. Also I think that
harnessing social to provide additional signals that can be used for scoring
would be neat.

Is there an RSS reader today that does any of this?

~~~
martinced
+1... I've said here repeatedly that Usenet and Usenet readers were, 15 years
ago, _way_ more advanced than things people are using now. Questions about,
say, Java in comp.lang.java.^ were leading to more interesting answers than
what is available _today_ in SO.

And, more importantly, it was so easy to follow a gigantic amount of threads
and find the information that would likely be of interest to you.

Sure this required good readers and users willing to learn to use these but as
a result it was incredibly more useful than what we have today. There were
some people who simply geniuses and who were explaining things in great way:
it was very easy to assign them good scores so that their interventions would
stand out.

What do we have today? Inferior crap like StackOverflow because, supposedly,
users would be too lazy to learn to use powerful functionalities.

I'm pretty sure one day we'll get some "Gnus meet StackOverflow" webapp which
is going to rock our world. I can't wait for the next big thing because
honestly we've made a gigantic step backward.

~~~
simmons
_"I can't wait for the next big thing because honestly we've made a gigantic
step backward."_

One of these days, those of us interested in a 21st century Usenet should
really get together and make it happen. I never used Gnus (I was more of a trn
guy) and I think Stack Overflow is pretty cool, but I do miss the ability to
sift through large quantities of high-quality posts using the tools and
interface that worked best for me.

The concept hasn't completely congealed in my mind, but some cool features
would be: separation of content from interface, great APIs, pseudonymous
identity with encryption and signatures, and some sort of a reputation system.

~~~
bborud
I'll make the pizza. You bring the beer.

------
Nux
RSS is not very good for social networks, they want you to visit and stay on
their web page, so that they can control and monetise properly.

Nobody is interested in ways to leak content and users outside their empire,
at the contrary.

One day, when the Internet will have transformed in the Amazon-Facebook-
Google-Microsoft walled garden we begin to see today, I shall tell tales of
how people used to build and run their own web sites and email servers and
visit each other's blogs and so on. And how they all let that go, because it
was "too hard" and they "didn't have time" to deal with it all.

Ultimately it's us who are at fault. We had it, but gave it all up.

We are giving up our privacy and freedom for illusory convenience and safety,
to paraphrase a famous saying.

------
nir
It might be naive, but my own little protest is avoiding Google+ whenever
possible, as a user and in projects I build.

RSS isn't dying of natural causes. Plenty of small-medium sites are getting
orders of magnitude more traffic from Reader than from G+. Google and other
major companies are trying to deprecate it in order to replace with their own,
tightly controlled, solutions.

~~~
Supermighty
G+ can't be avoided for too long. Google is using it to tie together Author
Rank, which helps for SEO. If you want your content to rank higher post-Panda
update you'll leverage G+.

~~~
codingthebeach
If that's true then G+ is more of a danger to Google than Facebook ever was.
Using the index as a way to strong-arm publishers into using a half-baked
Facebook clone may even work, short-term. Long-term this is one way Google can
lose Search.

~~~
weinzierl
It is true, Eric Schmidt said: “Within search results, information tied to
verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such
verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top
(verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be
irrelevance.”

~~~
hosay123
I assumed you were making that quote up, but holy cow, he actually said it.

My historical love of Google has been directly proportional to my unawareness
of Schmidt's privacy philosophy. The man's gone completely insane, and makes a
frankly woeful spokesperson.

~~~
sergiosgc
Eric Schmidt tanked Sun, Novell, and Google. His best CEO ability is ejecting
before the crash, so his effect on Google is not yet evident.

------
intopieces
I'm very put off by thus attitude that Google owes us all a free RSS reader,
as if they are the tech equivalent of the social safety net. Google has and
always will be a company focused on profits. They would be supremely
unprofitable if they sunk time and resources into dying technology just
because it had a few fans.

It's not hard to make an RSS reader and if you miss Google Reader so much,
sign off of HN and make your own, better version. But you won't, because you
know that Google is right in their decision to axe the whole thing.

~~~
skymt
I'm very put off by people presuming to tell me what I think or plan to do.

------
artificialidiot
I don't get why RSS is "dying". Many people who create online content that is
worth following provide a feed which you can subscribe through so many ways it
is not funny.

Maybe social network addicted people may not recognize but there is a whole
world who use email, instant messaging and other stuff like feeds to
communicate, which are very established and not beholden to whims of any
single moneymaking scheme.

Feeds are a very simple and open idea. Inability to put a toll booth between
the communicating parties doesn't mean feeds are useless or dying. It just
means you are unimaginative. Browsers may chose to hide the functionality out
of a desire to idiot proof their software but it doesn't mean people who have
an attention span more than a goldfish have no other ways to subscribe.

------
streptomycin
I see the "embrace" part. But I don't see any "extend" or "extinguish". Seems
to be just FUD. Lots of cynical people wish Google was as "evil" as 90s MS,
but that false equivalence just doesn't hold. It would only hold in some
outlandish scenario where Google added proprietary extensions to RSS to make
everything that operated with Reader incompatible with anything else, thus
eliminating the main advantage of RSS as a common standard (like MS did with
Java).

~~~
taligent
I have hundreds of starred articles in Google Reader. So yes it was more than
just RSS.

~~~
magicalist
That's a detail of the reader, not the formt. That's like claiming that
offering an option to order entries by date ascending _or_ descending is
extending RSS.

(moreover, you can export your starred stories and several readers support
importing them)

------
taylodl
RSS is a technology, not an industry and Google's killing Reader may not
necessarily kill RSS. I've switched to Feedly and love it. I wished I'd been
using Feedly _years_ ago. Reader is quite pathetic in comparison to Feedly
actually. But I didn't know that. I used Reader because it was from Google and
all my colleagues were using it.

As a result I'm checking out alternatives to other Google services. I've been
in a Google rut for many years now and it's time to get out of it. It's all
good.

~~~
jokermatt999
What do you like better about Feedly? I've switched over as well, but the less
compact interface (even after switching views as recommended by the bog post
for migrating Reader users) and general sluggishness compared to Reader have
annoyed me. I'd like to appreciate some of the differences instead.

~~~
taylodl
I should have mentioned I'm using Feedly on an iPad. On the desktop Feedly
isn't as compact as Reader - but there's a setting where you can make it
nearly so.

On the iPad I like the magazine layout and swiping to mark an article as read.
Having fewer articles presented at a time actually has been helping me better
focus on each article. And now that I can see more of the article I can better
determine whether it's really something I should read. Whereas before I tended
to skim the titles and try to weed out articles and figure I'd get to the
articles I might be interested in later. To then find out that I really wasn't
interested in that article.

But that's me. You might hate Feedly for the exact same reasons I like it.
Good thing you have until July 1st to find an alternative that works for you!
Good luck!

------
chirop
To me, the permanent archive of all RSS feeds is far more important than the
Google Reader front end. Critical comments that blog owners deleted on their
site are still found in the Google RSS archive. In some cases it exposes true
malfeasance, when blog admins change the comments of others. I can download
whole RSS histories myself, but without a link to an independent archive my
own copy is worthless as evidence, since I could have edited it myself.

~~~
gwern
> since I could have edited it myself.

You can limit the potential damage by publishing a hash precommitment of the
archive; then later if you need it, you can provide the archive itself, let
others verify that the hash matches the archive, and then any 'edits' could
only have been made before the hash was made (which might have been many years
ago, whenever an issue or scandal pops up which motivates a look into the
archive).

------
cinbun8
This has got to be a joke. Just because one company decided to shut their RSS
client, the 'RSS industry' is now abandoned ? Tell that to feedly who just
welcomed 500k users [1]. These were users that relied on google reader. RSS as
a standard / service is not on square 1. It is inadequate in some ways and
ATOM was supposed to fix that and was never really adopted as well as RSS.
There are tons of aggregators out there that use RSS (and ATOM) to get all
your news in one place. Use another client and move on.

1 - [http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-
mi...](http://mashable.com/2013/03/18/500000-google-reader-users-migrate-
feedly/)

~~~
taligent
It was more than a RSS client. It's also an API for third party apps.

------
gregjor
I offered to give Google my first born to keep Reader alive but they didn't
even respond. First iGoogle was given a death sentence. Then Reader. If they
shut down Currents or Google Print I am going to move to Canada.

------
magic_haze
And it's not just Reader: Google Talk is following the exact same strategy as
well. It supposedly is the world's largest xmpp network, but with a few extra
changes that makes compliant xmpp clients practically useless (e.g., not able
to add anyone inside gtalk from the outside: _they_ have to initiate the
request, supposedly for spam reasons.)

But then again, Facebook does the same thing...

------
don_draper
>>It’s not unlike the widely criticized model that Microsoft pursued in its
pre-Millennium days as a monopolist: Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Ridiculous. Microsoft works to eliminate the competition, whereas Google is
just not supporting it. RSS will not be eliminated due to this decision.

------
jswinghammer
I love using Google Reader but I don't see what the big deal is. It seems like
an RSS reader is something anyone can build in a month maybe. There are
alternatives that seem to be less than optimal but I assume they'll get their
act in gear. I would be in their place.

~~~
rahoulb
Well the article is about the synchronisation, not the RSS client.

I can read the same set of feeds in Flipboard on my phone, Reeder on my ipad
and NNW on my mac.

The people who were building alternative synchronisation systems gave up when
Google moved in with Reader; hopefully someone will step in with an
alternative now, but there are a LOT of apps that will need to be updated to
take advantage of the new system.

------
guelo
One big innovation new rss sync engines can provide is linking of posts. For
example, showing you blog responses from across the web to a post you are
reading. I think Google didn't show it because they have an aversion to
exposing the incoming links graph for whatever reason, but this would be a
killer feature for users.

Reader did have an excellent "recommended" feature that used some kind of
social metrics algorithm. That feature stopped being useful after the G+
debacle, but it could also be a killer feature. I'm sure there are many
others.

------
Aqueous
There's a really easy solution here.

Google should just donate the Google Reader application to the Apache
Foundation or another open source initiative so that others can host their
own.

In fact, it was a mistake to shut down the service without also announcing
that they were open sourcing it simultaneously. Look at all the bad PR that's
floating to the top of HN right now.

They open sourced Google Wave around the same time they shut it down, and that
was a far less popular and useful service. It avoided a lot of the bad PR that
the Reader shutdown is causing, however.

~~~
guelo
Reader is probably tied in to Google's back end infrastructure too tightly to
decouple it into a standalone app.

------
joering2
Google has a proven record of killing its own and acquired business/startups.
Please, next time you have a buyout offer from Google, please think about your
users and DO NOT sell! If you are in a position to receive offer from Google,
rather than not you have pending offers from others as well. There is NOTHING
Google can give you that will benefit your users more than other interested
parties can.

Anything other than Google search, Android, Google Cars and Google Glass is
doomed to extinct, sooner or later.

~~~
pjbrunet
Search is an easy problem once the hardware/bandwidth is cheap--they'll have
more competition soon. The "cars" thing they have to fight everybody--
insurance companies, car manufacturers, big oil, the govt. Pipe dream. I don't
see Glass going anywhere either, nobody wants to wear a camera on their face--
creepy. Adwords is funding the whole circus over there and publishers I talk
to aren't happy with how they're treated. Content is king.

------
anoncow
Perhaps there isn't money to be made providing (free) rss sync services. If
there was no google reader it might have been newsgator shutting down(or if it
was their main product they might have shut down their free service or
severely decreased their free quotas).

Either way, RSS "going back to 2006" is not a bad thing for anyone. Companies
will roll out products if they think there is a market. Google shuttered
Reader but they have products that do similar things. With Google+ you can
follow people (equivalent to following personal blog feeds on reader) and
blogs/websites with plus accounts(equivalent to following websites with feeds
on reader). The bright side is with g+ you get more interactivity. I always
wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the website or
blog. The dark side is with g+, content and delivery both will be tied to one
single service(with RSS atleast your content will still be available after
reader dies in july).

Google currents is doing something similar to reader too. The difference is
the lock in and the magazine like feel. Then there is Keep.

So perhaps RSS or atleast the idea behind it is not dead yet. Perhaps Reader
wasn't making any profit or perhaps Reader was eating into the potential
success of Google's other offerings and so it was killed.

~~~
brownbat
> I always wanted to comment on posts in a feed without having to visit the
> website or blog.

Just imagine if instead of killing them, they somehow entertwined Reader and
Sidewiki...

~~~
anoncow
reader + sidewiki sounds like a good idea. If that came with an option to use
a separate nickname, things could be golden. Google+ cannot do this on the
scale that reader could, simply because sites with RSS > Sites with g+
accounts. But that is an assumption.

------
ommunist
Rumours of the RSS demise are exaggerated. Just put a notice for your RSS
users to encourage them to use Feedly or something like that.

------
rafski
RSS was a business threat to Google, it allowed people to glance through
aricle headers and often read them whole without ads. Google Reader allowed
Google to contain this trend, then slowly phase it out as much as they could.

People easily forget ads are Google's main product that provides them he bulk
of their revenue.

------
lclarkmichalek
Where does the extend come in? Not that I ever used reader but the article
doesn't seem to mention any extensions to RSS other than a thing called
"bundles" which I have never heard of. Did reader have a lot of specific
extensions that make it hard to build a competing product?

~~~
itafroma
Google Reader has a number of features that are above and beyond simple
RSS/Atom parsing:

* Starring

* Sharing amongst other Google Reader users

* Smart sorting of feed items

* Marking as read

* Indefinite retention on feed items

Most of these, by themselves, are not hard to replicate (maybe the sorting is,
indefinite historical archive definitely is if you haven't already started),
but all these "extensions" to RSS/Atom parsing, so to speak, were exposed via
an (albeit undocumented) API that spawned a whole ecosystem of feed readers
that rely on it, because a major selling point for the past several years has
been "syncs with Google Reader".

~~~
magicalist
None of those are extensions of RSS, they're just features of the reader. By
your criteria, _any_ reader that doesn't just display the unparsed xml is
"extending" RSS.

The key to the "extend" step is that it has to be done in a way that
disadvantages others by breaking interoperation when they used to be able to.
Not only did RSS (and Atom) feeds continue to work across all feed reader
clients, but you can also export many of the features you list in a
straightforward and unobfuscated format (and via API, as you note).

~~~
itafroma
The Google Reader API providing those features is the _extend_ of _embrace,
extend, extinguish_ , not merely the features isolated away from the feed
parsing (which is I why I put "extensions" in scare quotes). Feed readers, due
to market demand, have coded to the API—which provides features above and
beyond what you can get from simple feed parsing and are only available from
Google—instead of the otherwise-interoperable RSS, Atom, and OPML specs.

So while yes, potential competitors could replicate those features (just like
Netscape could—and often did—replicate IE-specific extensions to HTML and CSS
with their own versions), it can't be done in a competitive manner. As a user,
if all my feeds, activity, friends, and retention are within Google's
infrastructure, there's no point in switching to another solution that
provides all those things—or worse, merely sticks to the simple standard of
OPML—unless I'm forced to (just like very few people coded to Netscape's
implementation because most were using IE).

That's the essence of embrace, extend, and extinguish: adopt a simple standard
(RSS, Atom, and OPML), extend it beyond that spec in a way competitors weren't
and the specs don't support (the API that adds starring, retention, etc. to
the mix of simple feed parsing), then watch as competitors who don't adapt to
your new "standard" fail (if you were developing a feed reader and didn't
support Google Reader's API, good luck with that).

~~~
magicalist
First, it's rather ridiculous to assert that an API provided _specifically_ ,
albeit unofficially, to allow syncing of the state of features with other feed
reader programs somehow disadvantages those other readers. It was a service
that existed, and other feed readers used it. Feedly has plans to provide a
similar API, and it will likely be available to many feed readers because most
of the work is done in creating it, not reading from it. They aren't trying to
crush the market through a non-standardized service, they're just fulfilling a
need.

Besides, Reader API support itself is still just a feature. You would need
something like interleaving non-standard entities into RSS feeds for an
equivalent to "extend". _That_ is the kind of thing that the phrase refers to,
as it fundamentally breaks what is supposed to be a standard that all parties
can code against. RSS has continued to work fine.

If what you were saying were true, then, for instance, browser add-ons would
be anti-web. Differentials in javascript engine performance would be anti-web.
Different locations for the forward and back buttons would be anti-web.

The closest analog in the browser would be browser sync. It's already becoming
a feature that users look for, as it is quite convenient to have your browser
history and bookmarks on your phone and computer synced. Soon it will likely
be essentially required for a browser to have a sync system if they want to
survive in the browser market. So far all of the browsers sync systems are
non-interoperable. Are they all using this feature as an effort to extend the
standards of the web in a way that disadvantages the other browsers in the
hopes of stomping out the competition?

No, and in fact, browser UI behavior is explicitly not standardized to allow
that kind of differentiation. The important part is that they can consume and
display the web correctly, so that it remains available to all, which leaves
them plenty of room to compete on features.

~~~
itafroma
I'm starting to think that maybe you don't really understand what the embrace,
extend, extinguish (hereafter EEE) strategy is. The whole purpose is to
intentionally provide something that others can hook into such that it's
unfavorable for competitors not to adapt to what you're providing.

The pedantic distinction you're making—that, in order for it to be an
extension it has to be embedded into the original spec and that add-ons don't
count—just doesn't hold water either: one of the most prominent cases of EEE
was Microsoft's development of ActiveX done allegedly done specifically to
break compatibility with the plugin system already in place by Netscape et al.

But more directly, modern browser add-ons aren't EEE because they aren't
billed as a spec and no one add-on implementation has become the de-facto
standard. Firefox, Chrome, and to a lesser extent Safari all have add-on
implementations that are relatively competitive with each other.

Features implemented as part of an EEE strategy are always billed as "just a
feature". But they have real consequences to a competitive marketplace. This
is why the loss of Google Reader is so impactful: companies like Feedly—who is
still just working on a Google Reader API-compatible implementation of sync
and other Reader features—now have only a few months to fill the void that
everyone in the space took for granted for years.

~~~
magicalist
You'll have to be more specific for how you would define "embrace, extend, and
extinguish", then, because it's difficult to parse from your comments anything
more than that a feature has to have consequences in a market place for it to
fit the "embrace, extend, extinguish" mold (it also doesn't help that the
author also offered nothing to back up the comparison other than the fact that
NewsGator no longer offers a feed reader).

ActiveX is actually a pretty bad example, as it was outside of web standards
and only has impact because of the close ties to the OS and the advantage
Microsoft therefore got there. It is therefore a pretty good example of some
of Microsoft's lower level anticompetitive acts, but it's a poor example of
"embrace, extend, and extinguish" (even if only for the fact that NPAPI was
itself essentially being made up as Netscape went along at the time).

No, the canonical examples of the phrase, coming from US v Microsoft itself,
refers to Microsoft's attempts to make Sun and Netscape irrelevant when it
came to Java and the web, respectively. The plan was to embrace the standards
of each, bringing support in as core OS features, and then literally extending
the standards with new APIs, tags, etc to add features that developers would
want. This would put pressure on those companies that in time they might not
be able to keep up with (or they would spend all their time reimplementing
Microsoft's features and lose their images as the trailblazers) because the
formerly-standardized content they used to be able to consume with their
programs would become unreadable and/or unrunnable without the extensions.
What's worse, Microsoft often designed APIs that were closely aligned with
Windows APIs, specifically to make it easy to implement there, and difficult
to implement efficiently elsewhere.

In other words, they _broke_ the standards in a way that if you didn't
implement the extensions, you couldn't consume the content that was supposedly
compliant with that standard. You aren't adding a feature that users want and
so other clients need to compete, you're adding features to the content
standard so that other clients _cannot function_ without them, and you're
doing it while pretending loudly that your extension is just part of the
standard.

So, no, a service that makes the _client_ better and that users soon demand
does not fit the bill (and, again, we're talking about an API specifically
existing for making it easier to interoperate on those features). Yes, it had
a market impact in that many users wanted support in any feed reader, and, now
going away, there will be a loss of functionality if someone doesn't
reimplement it. That's often the way with features. But it's a poor analog for
the actions of monopolists past.

------
moe
"RSS industry"?

Everything to spin a drama, I guess...

------
mosselman
I don't get all the fuss: "Google Reader was born in October 2005"..."the
short life and sad death of Google Reader"?

Come one, I think that 8 years is a very long time in the (online) IT world.
It was pretty obvious that RSS wouldn't be something for the long-run anyway.

~~~
slug
If RSS is too old to deserve existence, I wonder what we can say about
http,smtp,ssh ; tcp/udp/ip ; ethernet/wifi ? :)

~~~
mosselman
What nonsense. Either way. I said neither of those things.

It is not age that is the problem, it is RSS itself. RSS is just not a good
solution in the long run because, amongst other things, we a. get better and
better at parsing language, which makes a separate protocol unnecessary and b.
we, right now, are more into cloud based news delivery, think links on
twitter, etc.

More semantic alternatives to HTML (like HTML5, but good) will also make
things like RSS useless.

------
meerita
I never understood why Google didn't profit RSS well by doing a product polish
as Flipboard or Zite. They could have done something powerful as those and
they didn't. Instead of that, they did a crap app wich it doesn't even get
close. I would have been a happy customer of Reader wich such nice interface.

~~~
photorized
Google is a data company. They stand to gain very little from offering a
"passive" service like RSS - there just isn't much interesting data in the
user experience for them.

~~~
meerita
Well, the Flipboard UI allows you to insert ads between pages, they could
build a new entire way of ads placement, why not.

------
non-sense
In a way, isn't it good that Google has discontinued Google Reader. It gives
chance to other small players to grow and focus solely on improving their RSS
reader?

Yes, it was unfair to their users that they were left out suddenly. But I am
sure they will find good alternatives.

------
slig
I can't see what's the big deal. Those that were using an RSS reader can find
another replacement right now. And, as others have said, the replacements are
arguably better.

If anything, all this buzz may be bringing new people to RSS.

~~~
taligent
Like ? I use Reeder on iOS and OSX (very popular client apps) with hundreds of
starred articles.

By all means enlighten me as to a suitable replacement. I think people forget
that Google Reader was an API as well as a client.

~~~
lucian1900
Feedly promises to have such an API and is popular enough that Reeder is
likely to support it.

------
Metapony
They need to indent their stylesheet, but that's an interesting perspective,
and a nice overview for those needing a refresher as to the history of
Google's tactic.

------
yanw
"RSS industry"?!

I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have
to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.

One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS
in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard
became too reliant on one vendor.

Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of
social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to
keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so. Neither is it a commentary on
standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived
interests, something companies are wont to do.

As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a
Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:

[http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-
view-...](http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-
full-width-support/)

[http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-
sc...](http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-
newsblur)

<http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader>

When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as
yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be
skeptic.

~~~
gnosis
_"One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS
in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard
became too reliant on one vendor"_

I'm overjoyed that yet another for-profit corporation is out of this segment
of the internet market. If it gets some former Google Reader users move to
client-based, open source RSS readers, that makes for less spying on users and
more privacy; and the more decentralized the net gets, the better.

~~~
VMG
I can't wait to get back to the times where I had to poll all my feeds every
few minutes and saturate my bandwidth.

~~~
gnosis
Saturate your bandwidth by polling RSS feeds? What do you use to connect to
the Internet, a 300 baud modem?

------
andyl
One thing that strikes me about the piece is that it reads like actual
Journalism. Yes there is opinion and point-of-view, but it is mixed with
historical context, real comparables and quotes from actual industry people.

A lot of the so-called journalism I see today is fact-free, thinly-sourced
advocacy posing as news. Its nice when writers do a bit of legwork and put
some meat on their reporting.

Disclosure: not associated with ZDNet or Ed Bott. :-)

~~~
forgotAgain
I'm not disagreeing with the content of the original post but I do have a hard
time accepting it as journalism. Ed Bott has been a part of the Microsoft eco-
system for a long time.

------
martinced
zdnet? really? This "thing" has always been the low of the low and they've
been constantly defending MS everytime MS did embrace, extend and extinguish.

Actually zdnet is a pro-MS propaganda medium.

Who does seriously take this junk seriously?

There may a lot to criticize about Google's move regarding RSS but posting
links to zdnet isn't helping the cause.

