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I would have jumped on this a year ago.

The elephant in the room with every one of the Google announcements is that they've drained their coffers of trust/goodwill with the early adopter crowd, which is precisely the group you need to kick these things off.

Until Larry Page makes a clear, official public comment about this, I'm left wondering what is considered core product and what isn't. Is this? Is it an experiment? I get that this integrates with Drive, which is core product (it is, right?). Not the point. Using a new tool is me spending time and effort to learn/use/integrate into a workflow.

Until I know that I'm not going to be backtracking on this territory in two years when Google has another epiphany about strategy, I'm left feeling genuinely skeptical.




I'm not part of the whole Google Reader hate bandwagon, but this one makes me puzzled too. Isn't Google Keep a shade too similar to Google Notebook ( http://www.google.ca/googlenotebook/faq.html ), a product they shut down a couple years ago?

Does this show a lack of foresight in maintaining products, a lack of dedication to making them successful, or what? There's clearly a problem here.

Google has the same duplication problem all over the place -- constantly recreating projects that they've previously shut down, or running several redundant projects simultaneously. Google Chrome and the AOSP Browser, Buzz/Orkut/G+, Sites and Blogger (and whatever they had before). Reader and Currents, What is going on here? Rather than improving a project, they seem to have this epidemic problem of creating a whole new one and letting the old one get lost in the fray.


Writing code is fun. Maintaining code sucks. You expect A programmers to stoop to maintaining old crap?


Wait, wait, wait... have we finally concluded on the narrative that Google just throws random pies at the wall to see what sticks? Because I'm pretty sure that's been their modus operandi for the last fifteen years.

That said there's a Google clone for every single popular web product of the past five years that they dogfood constantly. That's all they kind of do these days, hire smart kids into trendy things. Whether pulling the trigger to launch them publicly, maintaining them publicly, or even as much as supporting them...

Well, if it doesn't make a buck selling ads and contribute to keeping that $50B/yr consolidated revenues growing year-over-year then it's just corporate charity work.

Making billions and billions of dollars while beholden to shareholders? That's a good evil problem to have.


There's also a Chrome extension developed by Google that does notekeeping and syncing. Not exactly the same, but along a similar vein is the Todo list functionality in Gmail. Assuming Google is committed to notekeeping, which one of their solutions is the "right one" to use?


This is a really nice comment that I think really cuts to the meat of the issue. I'll admit to being a pretty big Google apologist, but now that we know they are willing to ax services with devoted followings it makes me really hesitant to take the dive on new products they are releasing. My confidence in them being willing to support these services down the road has been great impacted.

Now with every new Google that gets released the first question that goes through my brain is "Will this be here in 2 years". That can't be a good thing.


They kept Google Reader for 8 years before shooting it...


That's a very relevant point. I'd say that for about 4 or 5 years it was in a safe, stable zone in the product strategy, but for the past 3-4 it was a dead app walking. Those last 4 years also say Wave, Buzz and other very big, public launches of products that were killed within a year each.

Clearly Google saw that it was flinging spaghetti at the wall just to see what stuck and decided

1) be really careful about big public announcements, people get excited, the product doesn't deliver and we look bad then

2) refocus (even if I don't like the strategy, at least they have one, so this is good, assuming they really are focused)

The problem is that they are now gun shy about saying anything clearly, apparently.

It's like a teenager that buys a new outfit they really like and mentions it only casually because if they get rebuffed by the peers for wearing it, they can always claim they didn't like it that much.

Sometimes you have to just define your own style and wear the outfit, man. Be proud.

That's what Google is missing.


And Wave was the next big thing, until they suddenly put a bullet in it.

Yes, it was "opened" and the code persists, to some extent.

I think a lot of people here on HN may nonetheless be pissed that, in the process, they absorbed and then destroyed the official, supported version of EtherPad.

Maybe EtherPad as company / commercialized product wouldn't have made it... But, maybe it would have. Regardless, Google burned a lot of good will with that one, too.

And, as numerous commenters have pointed out with respect to Keep: Google Notebook.

P.S. In my opinion, what killed Wave was not the technology (or, "concept"), but in part a batshit heavy and obscure UI. One of the early signs of Google's trend towards a "design ueber alles" failing.

Having spent many years in corporate environments, I saw Wave (as technology/"concept") as a real solution to a number of longstanding, pernicious problems I'd encountered with electronic communication, and its effect upon work, in those environments.

I never used Reader much (signed up and subscribed to the same feeds I already followed, but a local reader was quicker and easier for me). But I gather from many comments that its key, distinguishing features were not the straightforward feed processing but the "social" aspect of the product. The "network" and "meta" that Reader enabled.

For a company that (Google+, etc.) seems particularly interested at present in focusing on "network", this seems to be a particularly boneheaded move.

I also agree with the philosophy of "don't piss off the alpha nerds... although I don't particularly like the descriptor "alpha". They have a canny knack of revealing the interesting (and "interesting" is what sells, online). And of being good hires, for creating same.


For all the talk of focus after Larry Page took over, Google still seems to be releasing half baked products. I tried switching from Dropbox to Google Drive to get double the storage for the same price. Uploaded 100 gigs, got an error, and was told I had to re-download the 100 gigs to sync again. Using an early version of a Google product for a trusted system is riiiiisky.


Yay, more indignant Reader protest in the form of casual comments about a different Google launch, how refreshing!

As you noted Drive is actually acknowledged to be under someone's management (Apps) and not an afterthought kept on life support, so there's that.

And worst case scenario you can export your data and stick it in any number of similar services out three, it took me all of 3 seconds with Reader.


You must be some sort of savant, being able to manage the switch from Google Reader in 3 seconds.

How is the concern over first-adapter respect at all deserving of the dripping-with-sarcasm snark of your comment? Why is it so terrible that someone brings up the fact that Google now has a reputation for simply deadpooling products they no longer wish to support but that others have begun to rely on?

Why, on earth, should I trust a product that is meant to keep a record for me, when I can no longer trust the long-term support of said product.

But such concerns, to you, are pointless to discuss, because if this eventually gets deadpooled, all we'll have to do is take 3 seconds to pull out our data and move to a different product.


It has less to do with my superior intellect and more with the fact that every wannabe reader has an import from Reader button, which is made possible by Google allowing data portability.

You could buy more Drive storage to put your mind at ease (free v paid and all that), but keep in mind that the chances of whatever you're using getting bankrupt or "acqui-hired" away are just as likely.


I still believe that "3 seconds" was figure of speech for all practical reasons.

Switching is not just: [1. download GR OPML -> 2. upload to some Feed_Service_XYZ -> 3. Bingo!].

Not for a person who had curated his feeds over the years. Starred, tagged and have been using GR's sync services almost everywhere. He might be using it subscribe to new feeds on the web. Share. Etcetera.

But you might be knowing better(I mean about your comment).




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