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0 pointsvoytec2y ago0 comments

I see Reader as Google's attack on RSS' popularity. The product was killed off when its job was accomplished.

0 comments

Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put together by a team that really cared about it, but always had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot of their key people before it imploded:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.

nostrademons2y ago

Three greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of having Google product strategy set by executives who were accountable to the CEO/CFO rather than users/customers, vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture change is the root of the issues we're talking about in this thread.

slyall2y ago

No because if anything (the effect might have been small) it reduced the power of the open web and many websites (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc ) which are controlled by other companies.

flir2y ago

A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small.

I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.

freeAgent2y ago

What's frustrating is that Reader would have been complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge funnel by which users could discover content to share on Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the time I found content that I shared other places, such as Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).

wombat-man2y ago

I think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it needed to justify the upkeep.

lolinder2y ago

The upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was more that Google doesn't care to operate any product unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.

mike_hearn2y ago

By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the servers just kept on trucking.

dylan6042y ago

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

1 more reply

wombat-man2y ago

Broadly, I think some business models are better suited for smaller companies than Google for sure.

Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger audiences.

wombat-man2y ago

I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what the decision process on that was.

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lolinder2y ago

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

nostrademons2y ago

slyall2y ago

flir2y ago

A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small.

I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.

freeAgent2y ago

wombat-man2y ago

I think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it needed to justify the upkeep.

lolinder2y ago

mike_hearn2y ago

By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the servers just kept on trucking.

dylan6042y ago

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

1 more reply

wombat-man2y ago

Broadly, I think some business models are better suited for smaller companies than Google for sure.

Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger audiences.

wombat-man2y ago

I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what the decision process on that was.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse