RSS Pioneer Dave Winer on Google Reader's Demise

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/14/requiem_for_google_reader/

by samizdis • 3 years ago

2 2 3 years ago

samizdis• 3 years ago

"Google could have done a much nicer job of taking care of RSS, but they didn't do that," he [Winer] said. "And they're doing the same thing with the web today. It's incredible. They're doing it to the whole web. They're doing it slowly and they put a lot of hype onto it. They make it sound like they're doing good things. But in fact, what they're doing is they're going to shrink the web down to the part of the web that they can monetize."

BMc2020• 3 years ago

"At the time, the two founders of the company [Sergey Brin and Larry Page] felt that they had too many products," explained Winer. "And they wanted the company to get rid of some of the products.

"This is a very difficult thing for a company to do because they have users and people build on these products. They build systems out of them and people inside the company use the products. There are all kinds of reasons why once you put a product out there, you have a commitment to keep running it.

"But the founders said, 'No, we don't have that commitment. We're going to learn how to kill products.' And so they went around the company and they said, 'Look, which products should we kill?' The only one any group of people could agree with was Reader. So they said, 'Fine, we're going to delete Reader and we're gonna see what happens.' And that was the end of that."

RSS Pioneer Dave Winer on Google Reader's Demise

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