Google can be damn stupid sometimes. They shutdown Google Reader which is used daily by every journalist on the planet. This resulted in a ton of bad press which was completely foreseeable. Now they have some chieftain try to change the conversation into "Tell me what you loved about Reader", under the guise that they will use your comment to help make better products. As if Google has no data on how people use Google Reader.
What is funny is how many lemmings are falling into his trap.
> they will use your comment to help make better products.
Ironically, I can't really come up with 'better product' in this specific use case.
"Reader killed RSS" feels just wrong. If anything Reader made RSS thrive, because the data source that get sinked into Reader data is RSS.
Reader is a killer product that shifted the landscape because it fills one single role (RSS aggregator with read+fav status syncing), and does it extremely well, in a fantastically unobtrusive way. I sure as hell don't want another Google product as a remplacement, nor another existing or future product integrate RSS aggregation (and certainly not Plus) as part of it. I don't want a kitchensink or mishmash social/news/aggregator app.
Anyone current or past Google employee who put some work on Reader, here's my personal message to you: thank you, your work is awesome.
I agree. I find most of Google products awesome, and thank the engineers for their work.
I also think Google is smart to try to get out in front of the negative press. I think this attempt is solid approach to redirect people's passion in a positive direction.
The only mistake I see, is that nobody spoke up and said, "Reader doesn't have many users, but the users are bloggers and journalists, so we better shut this thing down with an extreme amount of empathy."
In the interest of being constructive, I think they should have:
1) Done a phased shutdown by disabling adding new feeds.
2) Published the API
3) Offer to work with alternative providers to make migration easy.
I wanted to reply, but then it asked me to sign up for Google+.
Then it hit me: That's exactly it. Google+ is Google's way of controlling an entire ecosystem of replies to topics. That's exactly the problem with Google+.
Google Reader was great because it gave you a window into the internet. A window that you could shape however you wanted.
Yes. I scanned the first hundred or comments on the post and none said that the experience on Reader (and Twitter) is owned by the reader, while the experience Google + (and Facebook) are owned by Google (and Facebook).
I do not want to share my reading activity with everyone. I just want to sit here on the corner and read. So why make it "social"?
There is a much simpler explanation: the lead of one project is looking to improve his project however he can. In this case, he sees the ruckus over Reader as a chance to get a bunch of feature requests. It's kind of like a vulture picking over a carcass, but hey, circle of life and all that.
It's important to remember that to Google products like Reader are blips on the radar. Every second they spent scheming about Reader cost them millions in Ad Sense revenue; hence, there was no scheming.
I would find it difficult to believe that Google+ wouldn't have already been looking into getting news feed subscriptions into their product. An RSS-style solution with discoverability would leap-frog Facebook's News stuff and could even put them into quasi-competition with Twitter.
It seems an inevitable sort of feature.
So the idea that they were surprised by this and are going to start from zero to build a new bit of G+ seems... a stretch.
You seem to be disagreeing with a thing nobody said. It is possible that they were already exploring a news feed feature and that they see this as an opportunity to find out what their users want from the feature.
What I'm disagree with, is the idea that there must be some overarching Google Unimind for this to have been a conscious strategy, and thus that angle is implausible-to-laughable.
I assert it's rather more plausible that such plans were under-way and closing Reader was a step to clear the way for a Google+ solution. Because nothing near a unimind would have been required to coordinate it and because the entire migration is more inevitable than not.
Is it possible the Google+ team is sincere in wanting to help people and capture feedback? Sure.
But that's rather orthogonal to the question of whether this statement and the timing of all this is primarily motivated by PR strategy.
Once Reader lost favor inside the 'plex people didn't want to work on it because it wouldn't show well on their resume. (you don't get promoted for applying CPR to a dead product and manage to keep it alive in intensive care for another budget cycle). So there were no doubt people who were working on other projects who had previously worked on Reader sometimes fixing bugs, and there was probably a product manager somewhere that had at one time been responsible for it, and kind of still remembered where the files were in the source tree. But as a "product" it could continue to exist in Google with nobody "in charge" of it. Its hard to believe, and even harder to explain to someone who hasn't be on the inside, but there are things that exist as Google "products" or "features" only because nobody turned them off, but there is no one at the wheel any more.
Once Reader lost favor inside the 'plex people didn't want to work on it because it wouldn't show well on their resume. (you don't get promoted for applying CPR to a dead product and manage to keep it alive in intensive care for another budget cycle)
Yeah, this is not the organization that should be acting as de-facto curators of the Internet, I'm thinking. What's being described here isn't a cathedral or a bazaar, but a bureaucracy.
OK, you don't get promoted etc.
But promotion isn't one and only motivation, right?
For two years there wasn't one Google employee who added one feature to Google Reader just for fun? Ouch.
I reiterate :-) its hard to explain for folks on the outside. There are so many shiny toys inside of Google that yes, you could easily go 2, 3, even 5 years before you even thought to yourself "Hmm, I wonder if we could make Reader do this ..."
More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling."
Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
It seems to me that it didn't need much in the way of support. I have been using it for several years and have never experienced so much as a glitch. That could be down to excellent support, of course, but to me it seemed a mature product that could have been left to run exactly as is for any length of time and nobody would have complained.
I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.
I don't disagree, but that seems to get into the gray area where we don't have enough information. Some of the other Google discontinuations were attributed to bandwidth usage in excess of any possible revenue mechanism. (I'm not aware of whether or not that was debunked, either?) Was that the case here? No idea. It seems plausible that Reader uses more bandwidth than Translate would.
Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.
There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.
It assumes that those who are responsible for replacing Reader were part of the decision that it was going away. In large companies, the people who decide such things are often not the same people who engineer them.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
That people like you assume it's malice, or some conspiracy or evil plot, just saddens me.
Full disclosure: I have empathy, and own GOOG stock.
It is possible that Mr Zunger woke up this morning and thought , "This is a great oppourtunity to get a bunch of vague and unsubstantiated feedback on a product that is being shutdown. I'd like to spend half my day moderating comments".
It could also be that he wanted to redirect some of the passion for google reader in a positive direction. Make Google a bit more empathetic and friendly.
It could be some combination of the two.
I don't see malice here. I think Mr. Zunger made a smart move.
Now if he actually thought he was going to learn something he didn't already know from those comments, that would sadden me.
He is smart enough to realize that comments like those have a huge power-user sample bias and are mostly useless.
Yes, I would do the same thing. The only mistake I see is the way they handled the Google Reader announcement, which Mr Zunger wasn't involved in.
Then again, if I were so smart, I wouldn't have made the lemmings comment. I meant it as a mild joke, though you and other people interpreted it as an serious insult to 500 people and Mr Zunger's character.
Pretend for one yoctosecond that you work at Google, disagree with the decision to shut down Reader, and are in a position to try to make the product you're working on help fill the void.
So, Google would allow another team to create a clone of what they shut down after all these years? Their excuse was that they need to focus on fewer products
My point was expressed pretty clearly, I thought, and I did it without calling several hundred people "lemmings" and without calling Yonatan Zunger a liar. I have a nice list of names I'm perfectly willing to call jcampbell1 in response, but I felt sarcasm was more polite.
Or is this one of those cases where "lol u suk" is the preferred response?
What is funny is how many lemmings are falling into his trap.