

Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem - watchdogtimer
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/finale-for-now-on-googles-self-inflicted-trust-problem/274286/

======
bsimpson
Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire
web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of
launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab
for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer
the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our
business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for
enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a
compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless,
so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum.

There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a
free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing
in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool
every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying
wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has
traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into
the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could
seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope
they'll monetize later.

~~~
msabalau
There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms,
products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple
Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in
less time Reader existed.

Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that
they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because
of Apple's behavior. I doubt it.

At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both
of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will
never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that
it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type
of technology that I expect will be influential.

There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just
Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead
ends.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is
increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead
ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as
adopters.

~~~
pifflesnort
> _There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms,
> products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The
> Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and
> discontinued in less time Reader existed._

... and nobody's Newton disappeared.

In fact, you can still find one: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Newton-
Original-MessagePad-OMP...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Newton-Original-
MessagePad-OMP-Model-Number-H1000-Ready-To-
Go-/140937551295?pt=PDA_s_Pocket_PC_s&hash=item20d0885dbf)

This is the major difference between cloud architectures and DRM-licensed
media that you rent, versus actual products that you own.

~~~
msabalau
True, but regardless, a not inconsiderable part of the value of a Newton died
when the platform came to the end of it's life. A betamax machine or an HD-DVD
player may still exist, but that does not mean a lot for their owner.

~~~
CurtMonash
The people who bought VHS instead of Betamax aren't getting a lot of value
from their systems at this point either. And I've bought, used, and thrown
away multiple DVD players over the years.

~~~
hugofirth
Point of order: the hypothetical HD-DVD player to which @msabalau refers is
not a standard DVD player, as you seem to have assumed. HD-DVD was a format
iteration meant to compete with Blu-ray. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD>

~~~
Evbn
Point of information: that was a point of information, not a point of order.

A point of order would be something like pointing out that someone replied
under the wrong parent.

~~~
CurtMonash
Isn't it a point of order to say that somebody incorrectly called a point of
order?

------
erichocean
We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the
following Google headline:

 _Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain
competitiveness and re-ignite growth._

Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll
get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat!

Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the
old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday,
Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway.
Hopefully, it won't be too late.

~~~
nonamegiven
Google swing back? I doubt it. Once they crossed over into a billion+ company,
their mission became to be a billion+ company. That they still organize the
world's information, or claim to do whatever they did in the past, is just
momentum that will bleed off.

They make money. That's all they do. Nothing wrong with that, but they're
never going to be what they were. Their future is to be General Electric, or
Comcast, or HP in their declining years. The difference between HP and Google
is acceleration; the days of Bill and Dave are remembered wistfully, as they
were not there for the decline and destruction.

The days of Page Rank and Labs and excitement are dead and gone, as are the
human days of Lestat, never to return.

------
hugofirth
The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I
have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words
(for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing:

The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over-
zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of
sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the
wider user base who look to them for guidance.

\--------

Their temper tantrum has achieved several things:

\--------

\- Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and
weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct
to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an
unprofessional article by Om Malik: [http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-
google-you-can-keep-it-to...](http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-
can-keep-it-to-yourself/)

\- Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as
Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep
because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the
ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback,
contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy
becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat
themselves on the back for 'getting it right'.

\- Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same
form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new
systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the
life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good
thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps,
Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap &
Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing
unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that
would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice
to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ?

\- Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good
thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining
session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and
far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem
rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either.

\--------

The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing:

\--------

\- Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google
Reader.

Some facts to finish off:

Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the
interests of it's shareholders.

It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments.
Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments.

Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture
(G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always
accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path
to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In
order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be
wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and
account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the
weight of their own legacy support.

When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have
your cake and eat it too.

RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how
loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me
that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other
people ... HMV is still shutting down!

\--------

I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to
get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."

~~~
recoiledsnake
>Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the
interests of it's shareholders.

I seriously doubt the shareholders were going to be pissed off at Google if
Reader were continued. And interests of shareholders is not a black and white
thing, for example CostCo pays and treats their workers better than Walmart
does. They don't have a legal responsibility to reduce all possible expenses
for the sake of profits. The executive leadership has considerable leverage in
running a company.

>When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have
your cake and eat it too.

That doesn't make much sense. Google has $48 billion cash on hand and made
$2.1 billion in net income in just the last quarter. The big companies run a
lot of things that are not directly profitable but give them goodwill and a
halo effect of staying in the ecosystem.

~~~
_delirium
On the first point, yes, this is a frequent misunderstanding of the law. The
management of a company has a general fiduciary duty to shareholders, but does
_not_ have any kind of narrow legal obligation to maximize profits, certainly
not over any specific timeframe. They have quite large leeway to make
decisions on the basis of whatever strategy they think is correct, and they
may value things such as "customer loyalty" and "brand perceptions" in
whatever way they see fit. If Google's management decided, for example, that
it was important for their reputation that they stand behind their products
long-term, and therefore that nothing would be shut down except in
extraordinary circumstances, there'd be no legal problem with adopting that
policy, even if it lost money short/medium-term. That's simply a strategic
decision, which might be wise or unwise, but which courts have no authority to
second-guess. Shareholders could vote out the board if they disagree with it,
but there would be no violation of fiduciary duty.

~~~
hugofirth
I am not suggesting the the law is black and white. Nor am I saying that there
is anything codified as law that would require Google to do anything so
specific as moth ball reader. The decision to mothball reader (rightly or
wrongly) was clearly a business decision: Google obviously felt it could
better serve its user-base as a whole (and by extension its shareholders) by
distributing its time and LOCs in other ways. The reason I brought up the law
was in support of the general point that Google has every right to distribute
its finite time and resources with this tenet in mind.

If they chose to keep Reader going it would be purely on the basis that its
niche user base is somewhat influential, and might have some success on the
future success of their products. That is not in service of it's wider user
bases' interest.

------
Shank
I'm really starting to get annoyed at the whole "whelp, Google Reader died,
therefore everything else is unsafe" mantra being carried by the tech industry
as of late. Sure, it was worth mentioning early in the game (and more
importantly once), but at this point it's become a bandwagon.

The press is declaring Google Reader a sign of things to come, but for the
average user this has little effect. If we assume Google wasn't lying, and the
users were dropping off, it makes sense for them to cut off a product that
wasn't being actively developed in the first place. I'm a Reader fan, and I
hate that it shut down, but that's beside the point - Google is trying to
build new, better products, not let old ones fester without support or
development.

This doesn't even tackle the fact that Keep isn't a true Evernote competitor.
It's more of a supplement/addition to Evernote. For once, a Gizmodo article is
relevant here: [http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-
googl...](http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-google-keep-
cant-replace)

~~~
taligent
You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

And there has been this assumption with Google that they would keep their APIs
available. Especially for something a innocuous as an RSS API. But that
doesn't seem to be the case.

~~~
Shooti
> You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

A hacked up, reverse-engineered API. Since it was never official they haven't
actually broken any promises.

------
cromwellian
No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't.
That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive.
There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write
articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you
iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones.

Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots
of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing
Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day,
only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in
oodles of their own internal projects.

Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma.

IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is
to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple
of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around?
Or Vine? Path?

The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are
building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them.

Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have
siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non-
transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be.

The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data
transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook,
Apple, Microsoft, et al.

------
SeanDav
Besides search and gmail, I have no intention of ever using another Google
offering again. I also now regularly back up up gmail using Thunderbird just
in case Google does something stupid there as well.

~~~
manaskarekar
Personally, I think if it weren't for Search and Gmail with its tie-in effect,
people would have moved out of all other Google services a long time ago.

I do not like this new direction Google has taken since the past few product
redesigns (Gmail, Google Groups, Image Search among others) where the products
have gone from beautifully functional and feature rich to outright broken even
for basic features. Groups has become absolutely unusable.

The Gmail redesign was a sore point and I customized it to be as close as it
could be to the older design, but I expect them to break it further in the
future.

------
TillE
> and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds
> information.'

This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the
Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting
all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the
problem at hand.

Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts
of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but
from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon
enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a
different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's
value in diversity.

~~~
olalonde
> Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs
> in one G+ basket

What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before
G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is
there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?

------
molecule
The speed w/ which Google deployed, and then discontinued Google Buzz
discouraged the adoption of Google+ for many folks, myself included.

> Launched February 9, 2010 > Current status Discontinued December 15, 2011

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I
couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I
work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I
couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was
introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google
announced Wave was dead.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ>

~~~
freehunter
At least they open-sourced it and released a stand-alone version via the
Apache Foundation. You can still use Wave, it's just called Apache Wave or
Wave in a Box.

------
thomholwerda
Google Reader has been active for 8 years. That's longer than most technology
products. In addition, there are countless alternatives to choose from, and
you can easily get your data out of Reader and move to one of those countless
alternatives.

This whole thing has been so overblown. It's like everyone is bored or
something.

~~~
taligent
I have hundreds of starred articles which unless someone makes a replacement
for Google Reader is going to disappear come July. For me it's like losing
years worth of bookmarks.

And I hope that you post the same thing if/when Google discontinues Google
Mail.

~~~
egor83
Well, strictly speaking, starred messages are included in OPML bundle that you
can download. Even if you don't get complete replacement for GReader, you can
still extract information from that file, it's just JSON.

------
mark_l_watson
Blogger seems like a direct competitor to Google+

Does it seem unrealistic to worry that Google might cut that? It is easy to
export data from Blogger to other blogging systems (I just moved off of
Blogger), so at least good for Google for making it easy to export data from
their products.

------
nell
The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that
bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.

------
Tichy
Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer
expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going
extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services
based on open standards.

Bashing Google seems silly...

~~~
lmm
I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core
business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for
whom this is a niche side product.

------
lingben
really shocking to see the extent of myopia over at google, for 'smart people'
they are acting incredibly dumb

~~~
macspoofing
I'd venture to say that this is all Larry Page. The start of this "myopia"
seems to coincide with him taking over as CEO.

~~~
taligent
It actually started when Larry met Steve Jobs and was recommended he focus his
efforts.

Ever since then it's been all about Google+ and finding new ways to force feed
to everyone.

~~~
rhizome
Let us now daydream about the possibility that Steve sabotaged Larry.

~~~
yuhong
Reminds me of this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524>

------
lnanek2
Wonder how long until they shut down Keep with everyone having put a lot into
using it. We should start a web site for pooling bets...

~~~
mtgx
5 years? Would that be enough? Or do you like using services for life?
Especially ones of such little value and little tie-in as a note app. Most
people would rather get bored with it and try something new than be upset
about Google killing Keep in 5 years.

------
deelowe
Did everyone forget about this? [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-
wood-behind-fewe...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-
fewer-arrows.html)

------
at-fates-hands
I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer
service or support of their products is horrendous.

That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of
their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild
for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.

