
Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense - dsr12
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-reader-it-was-self-defense/
======
easyfrag
OK the pendulum in the tech world is swinging too far towards the "ruthless
focus is the way to success" school of thought. I get where it comes from and
there's certainly some truth to it, but at some point regularly creating
products that consumers use and then killing those same products a few years
later is also going to do some serious damage to a company and its brand.

Oh look, Google has a product called Currents, maybe I should use this
infrastructure to build a workflow or even a business on? But wait a minute
this is Google, a company who regularly sacrifices products, even ones with
millions of users, on the alter of "Focus". Will this Google product be around
a few Springs from now? Then why should I even take the risk of learning to
use it and maybe depending on it?

~~~
mmahemoff
"creating products that consumers use and then killing those same products a
few years later"

You're right, but this is a product that ran for eight years. It was free,
showed all signs of being killed for several years now, and can be migrated to
another service. I think Google's brand can survive dropping a few products
like this after 8 years if they're not going anywhere...assuming of course
they continue to innovate elsewhere.

~~~
ijk
I am not betting for or against that assumption. I will note that they have
nothing as big as search (except maybe YouTube) and Microsoft and Amazon have
been competing and rendering ad-supported search irrelevant, respectively.

------
stroboskop
'Self-defense'? The post's key quote sums up Google's relation to RSS:

 _lead with a compelling user experience first and then build an API from
there, an API which may be based on open standards, but only if it’s a means
to an end._

Although an open standard, RSS is a special case: The DNA of RSS is
incompatible with the data-greedy centralization enforced by the Google,
Facebook, Twitter and their likes.

~~~
Gormo
Seems like a variant of the old MS strategy of "embrace, extend, exterminate".
The open source movement was in part motivated by a desire to limit
Microsoft's control over software users in the nineties.

Perhaps it's time for an organized "open internet" movement to build protocols
and communities that resist the tendency toward centralization of data and
control of user experience that's increasingly evident in the services offered
by the big players (and even the smaller ones - today, I wanted to post a
comment on a blog article, only to discover that the latest version of Disqus
has disabled OpenID support).

I think walled-gardenism on the internet has far more dangerous implications
than closed-source software ever did, and it's really sad to see this
spreading meme of building walled gardens as the only path to commercial
success infecting Google.

~~~
mmahemoff
As the OP, I agree it's sad that decentralized standards haven't "won" in the
way they were expected to 10 years ago; it's the reason we now have Facebook,
Twitter, and Google connect buttons instead of just Open ID.

The question is, when you say "it's time", how do you make it happen? Google
tried to make it happen with standards like OpenSocial, but the trade-off for
increased flexibility was often poorer UX, and meanwhile they watched
developers jump onto standards that were more closed, but had many more users.

There's certainly a sweet spot where open standards meet a mainstream user
base; the web and HTML5 overall continue to do fine, notwithstanding heavy
competition from the more closed native platforms. This is very much due to
the great amount of innovation amongst browsers and web apps, both of which
touch the user directly, and less because users care about open for open's
sake.

So my suggestion is if you want to encourage open standards, focus on the user
first.

~~~
anon1385
>As the OP, I agree it's sad that decentralized standards haven't "won" in the
way they were expected to 10 years ago;

I don't know what most people expected, but it seems like there were at least
some people complaining about the direction the web (or internet as they it
called back then) was going even in 1997:

<http://www.arachnoid.com/freezone/>

The root of the problem is commercialisation, and a lot of people are to blame
for that, including the creator of the site you are currently using.

~~~
Gormo
I don't think the problem is commercialization per se; it's the short-
sightedness and narrowness of the current commercialization strategies that
are the source of the problem.

Google became a multi-billion dollar company by supporting and contributing to
the open internet over the course of ten years; their current worrying tactics
are very recent. So we know that it's very possible to be wildly successful
without undermining your customers' interests (and in the long term,
undermining your customers' interests is almost always unsustainable).

The problem is that we've got big players like Google and Facebook who have
become risk-averse as they grown, and, having maximized the potential of their
original founding visions, have shifted into consolidating their positions in
order to preserve the status quo at the expense of others. This is a pattern
that seems to recur again and again in the industry.

The way to break it, of course, is to be the source of the creative
destruction that undermines the status quo - few large, vested enterprises are
willing to do this, though, which is why we see them ultimately becoming
dinosaurs who are displaced by startups operating under new paradigms.

I'd hoped that Google, given its nature, would be the one organization that
might be able to avert the pattern, but I guess not; they should be doing
exactly the opposite of what they're doing now, and support a wide range of
products and services, and looking for innovative monetization strategies for
products that aren't immediately profitable. But instead, they're going for
ultra-focus on what seems to work in the here and now, and trying to entrench
the status quo, which will take them down the well-trod path to eventual
failure.

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larrys
"As crazy as it may sound, today even a billion-dollar business is simply a
distraction to Google "

"If the company maintained every niche product with N thousand fans, even
paying ones, it’d become the very bungling bureaucracy we love to hate. For a
company with Google’s ethos and standing, any such dead-end, non-revenue-
producing product that’s retained is holding others back"

For any future CEO's of large companies that might be reading the above please
keep in mind that sop for this situation is to sell the product or service to
another company. This has typically been how business has always operated.
Even if the business lost money there is someone out there who would buy it.
Taking the "don't have time for this we are moving so fast" is nonsense. The
"distraction" and "rounding error" card is way overplayed.

~~~
thraxil
Has Google ever sold any product off?

Could they, even? They don't build isolated products the same way that many
other software companies do. Everything they build is built on their own
infrastructure, not some commodity stack. Even if they released the source
code to Reader for free, would it do anyone any good without the full suite of
BigTable/Chubby/GFS/Googlebot/etc. services that I'm sure it is tightly
integrated into?

~~~
opinali
We have sold SketchUp off to Trimble (but with a parnetship to keep the
3DWarehouse and Sketchup Free available). Not a typical scenario however.

------
mgkimsal
"any such dead-end, non-revenue-producing product that’s retained is holding
others back, and prevents the company from moving forward and making true
innovations instead of incremental improvements."

WTF?

I can just imagine the shareholders meetings... "We've had to put the self-
driving car project on hold - Google Reader is just eating up too many
resources, and dammit, we just can't afford to innovate with all the hundreds
of engineers continually improving Google Reader with new features and
functionality. And Maps? Forget ever seeing new functionality there - all our
brainpower is trapped up in Reader (and Google Voice, and Wave, and...)".

I don't buy it for a second. What 'true innovations' have they been held back
from by having Reader and similar services around?

~~~
saraid216
How many true innovations have you failed to capitalize on because you had to
pay the bills?

~~~
Executor
As if google reader didn't have ads? If monetization was the issue, why didn't
they allow a paid option to keep it going?

It seems like you are ignoring some simple business issues.

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pauljonas
More handwaving about "innovation" but no counter to the truth that other
services simply cannot offer and maintain a product on the level and stature
that the hardcore Google Reader users are accustomed to.

I hope I am wrong about this, but every article like this simply shouts this
out like it's unadulterated gospel truth, bereft of the multitudes of
empirical evidence that it is simply not a given.

~~~
mmahemoff
I think we'll see the opposite. Services like Feedly and Newsblur are already
delivering a service which at least some population of people have preferred
to use for several years. Even paying for it while Reader was free. And now
they are in a position to serve the many Reader users moving over.

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oth3r
He doesn't do a very good job arguing his point which is basically "Google
moves forward rather than maintaining the status quo, so they can't afford to
turn into a big bureaucracy with aging products."

Google has lots of products that no one's using, why take one away that many
people depend on every day? The reason Google's getting rid of Reader is
pretty simple, they don't want their own products for consuming and sharing
information competing against each other, namely Google+.

~~~
Someone
Here's my view on this:

I have been using Google Reader for ages, through FeeddlerRSS on my iOS
device. For most of that time, I haven't thought for even a second "that's
nice of Google, providing this sync service for free". I haven't seem a Google
logo or ad, either. In fact, even now that I have been checking whether I
actually use Google Reader, it took me quite an effort to find that out.

Given that, why would Google keep that service running for me?

~~~
mgkimsal
Because people have come to rely on it. And no one is suggesting that they run
it for free - they could easily charge a few bucks per year, cover their
administrative overhead, and keep their foot in this space, while a) not
losing money, and b) not losing trust from people who may want to adopt other
google tech in the future.

I've still got gmail as an email which I use a lot, but would be extremely
hesitant to ever trust them with anything else (I've also got other email I
manage on my own). When the sands shift in a few years and gmail doesn't make
sense for them any more, they may easily just shut it down, or severely limit
it.

Google Business stuff? Would not use it. Google Checkout? I use it, and their
tools have not developed at all in the past few years. Google Voice? They have
to be losing money on the phone numbers, and I will not be surprised one bit
if they shut it off in the next couple years. And people will whine/complain
about that too, but the writing's been on the wall for a while - don't trust
businesses that you don't pay money to (and don't trust a business to be
around _just_ because you pay them either, but it's a start).

------
ChuckMcM
_"So Google has an opportunity to win over media brands right now,"_

I would be amazed if Google became a "media" company and Marissa turned Yahoo
back into a "search" company. That would be some weird stuff right there.

------
mikeleeorg
I used to think Google's vision for Google Reader was to be a "content
subscription" service, where anyone could "subscribe" to any site and get that
content delivered to them directly - like a Google Currents for any site:
blogs, media, etc.

"RSS" would be dropped as a concept, since the general Internet user has no
idea what that is. Behind-the-scenes, it might still be used though, along
with content crawling (something Google already does). The value to Google
would be another data point on content ranking. For example, if someone
subscribes to a site, that site must be of high value. Time-on-site (or time-
on-article) might even be a useful proxy of how engaging that content is, as
are tags, social shares, and other meta-actions a user could take on an
article.

But perhaps there isn't a big enough opportunity for Google to pursue that.
Too bad.

P.S. I'm not a Google Currents user. If I basically described Google Currents,
then perhaps Google IS thinking about this. But then, why not merge Google
Reader & Google Currents together?

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Mahn
_Even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google_

I think they are exaggerating a bit there. Sure, million-dollar businesses
_are_ a distraction for Google, but _billion_ dollar ones? Pretty sure they
actually like them. It's besides the point of the article, because Google
Reader probably wasn't even anywhere near of generating millions in
advertising, but still.

------
michaelpinto
How about offering Google Reader as a feature in another product like Google+?
If you think about it both Facebook and Twitter already do this, so why can't
Google pull it off? It shows a lack of empathy for your most loyal users, but
then again empathy is something you don't get when you're the "gifted kid".

------
rafski
RSS is a way for the audience to access fresh web content without having to
visit the original websites. Well, Google is an ad company — it makes money
selling ads on those websites. RSS was a threat to Google's core business
similar to ad blocking plugins.

Google Reader's role was to contain the fad of ad-free news reading, it also
provided rich data about what people read. As soon as they saw the use of RSS
fading, they could finally ditch the Reader, hoping it would also further
marginalize RSS. They still can mine the Feedburner data, they'll still know
what people read.

Did Google also have a role in making RSS unpopular? Would RSS grow bigger if
Google didn't come up with the Reader? This would be, ekhmm… a far-fetched
hypothesis…

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brown9-2
_If the company maintained every niche product with N thousand fans, even
paying ones, it’d become the very bungling bureaucracy we love to hate._

This is a bold assertion with no evidence or argument behind it.

~~~
mmahemoff
The Innovator's Dilemma is one good basis for this argument
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_Dilemma>). I can't do it
justice, but in short, senior management can lose focus on long-term trends if
there are too many diverse products being maintained. And whether they are
savvy managers or not, they are in a position to heavily influence the
direction of everyone across the whole company, meaning that the company can
quickly lose its ability to see the forest for the trees.

------
bcks
Why don't they sell Reader? Or spin it off as an independent company? Or put
it up for auction? I can't think of when they've ever done anything like this
with one of their services, and I can only speculate why. But I can imagine
there are lots of companies who would love to inherit a hard-core audience
that large.

------
webwanderings
> even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google

Google can keep its Glasses, its self-driving Cars, its whatever. In the world
of Internet's haves and have-nots, the average user would survive even if he
has to with Made in China products.

------
progrock
I know this is slightly off topic, but it would seem only natural to me to
actually place a feed reader in the browser itself - actually have browsers
that have smart UIs and are more than just fast javascript processors and
rendering engines.

~~~
saraid216
Dynamic bookmarks have been around forever...

~~~
progrock
A little exaggeration, but that's a good point. A better bookmark UI then!

~~~
saraid216
I made the calculation of "forever" via internet-time-units. It was longer
than a year. According to Wikipedia, it was... 2004.

But seriously, you're right that the challenge is in actually designing a good
UX for yourself. You've got four months to mimic Reader if that's what you
want to do. I'd suggest XSLT, since RSS actually predates JSON, it's so old.
That doesn't allow for any potential mistakes by RSS creators, though, which
might be hairy. /shrug

~~~
progrock
And not every browser has implemented them. Do you have control of the when
they are updated, and how often etc? I like the idea though of perhaps just
having them as simple bookmarks. That would allow for easy syncing.

Syncing history - could help regarding your reading history (privacy aside.)

Coupled with an 'easy read' mode in the browser (I haven't tried Safari in a
long while,) might make for a pleasant experience.

Non of the popular browsers have a good Bookmark UI IMHO, which leads to
inappropriate tab use.

------
_of
Interesting post. Slightly off topic, but why do people in IT use biological
terms like DNA and ecosystem when discussing things that relate to business?
Please use appropriate vocabulary, there must be other words that can be used.

------
mtgx
I hope Google doesn't intend to remove XMPP from Gtalk in their next version
of messenger (I think there will be a major overhaul of their messengers with
Android 5.0 and new ChromeOS at I/O).

------
sramsay
To summarize: Google killed off Google Reader because it no longer makes sense
for their business.

Rather begs the question, doesn't it?

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initself
They could just leave the servers running and let people continue to use with
almost zero upkeep.

~~~
ohsnapman
There's always upkeep. Very few things at scale require zero or even near zero
upkeep - these aren't toy apps that get no traffic. Google has stated that
Reader was an app with a very heavy amount of use from a small number of
users.

The sense I get from reader being discontinued is that it was being kept alive
as a best effort, and the effort was becoming too complex, too difficult to
take on without real staffing. I suspect "leaving the servers running" was
what they were doing for the last few years, and it wasn't working anymore.

~~~
cromwellian
There's more than upkeep, there's also risk. Any product that collects
people's data has privacy and regulatory consequences that exposes the company
to risk. You can't just put a product that has those kinds of risks on
"autopilot".

Technically, one or two engineers probably could keep something like Reader
going, a drop in the bucket for Google, a rounding error. The true cost is not
the upkeep, but the costs of the risks. If not investing any significant
resources into upgrading and maintaining Reader means some snafu over personal
data leakage, then you're looking at being hauled in front of Senate panels,
and EU regulators, and civil suits.

Remember, Reader was written a long time ago by an understaffed and under
resourced team.

