Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-reader-it-was-self-defense/

by dsr12 • 13 years ago

62 49 13 years ago

pauljonas• 13 years ago

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.

mmahemoff5• 13 years ago

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.

initself• 13 years ago

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

ohsnapman• 13 years ago

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.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

Makes sense, until you realize that Google makes $10+ Billion in profit, and almost all of it it's because of the trust and goodwill factor from the online crowd. Once you start to maximize everything and refuse to leave a penny on the table, that trust goes

cromwellian• 13 years ago

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.

oth3r• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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?

mgkimsal4• 13 years ago

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).

svachalek• 13 years ago

Based on the title this is what I was expecting to read. RSS doesn't steal much/any of Facebook's market but its usage among the niche crowd that uses G+ is significantly higher.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

"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.

easyfrag• 13 years ago

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?

mmahemoff5• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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.

saraid2164• 13 years ago

I remember when people started saying this about Apps.

Why the hell haven't people learned yet?

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

I'm still not sure what Google Currents is. From what I can tell it's a smartphone/tablet news thing, but I have no way to try it.

mtgx• 13 years ago

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).

stroboskop• 13 years ago

'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.

Gormo4• 13 years ago

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.

mgkimsal4• 13 years ago

You'd actually need to build the software that gets used, not just protocols.

The majority of the browser usage is with three pieces of software: IE (Microsoft), Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple). None of these players really have a huge stake in 'openness'. We're computing at their mercy right now, and if/when they decide to adopt some new protocols (or drop support for others) we all just have to suck it up. Move to Firefox is a good option right now, but might not be in a few years.

mmahemoff5• 13 years ago

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.

mikeleeorg• 13 years ago

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?

larrys• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

mmahemoff5• 13 years ago

Not mentioned in the article, but I did tweet this very point (https://twitter.com/mahemoff/status/312387676630298624).

Why they tend not to do it is is likely because of infrastructure, privacy and security concerns, regulations (EU privacy laws come to mind). And furthermore, they'd need to find a good home for it, or risk further backlash. So there are risks in terms of legal, regulation, and resources. A company like Google can't just transfer SSH keys to the highest bidder on eBay.

All that said, I think in this case, there might be a more compelling reason to make the effort than normal. There's clearly a lot of passionate users, many of them influencers, and it's relatively simple to transfer people's OPML with some extra history data. I can see it's far from trivial though.

mgkimsal4• 13 years ago

"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?

saraid2164• 13 years ago

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

Executor• 13 years ago

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.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

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.

mmahemoff5• 13 years ago

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.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

> 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.

michaelpinto• 13 years ago

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".

sramsay• 13 years ago

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

Rather begs the question, doesn't it?

Mahn• 13 years ago

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.

progrock3• 13 years ago

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.

saraid2164• 13 years ago

Dynamic bookmarks have been around forever...

progrock3• 13 years ago

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

_of• 13 years ago

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.

bcks• 13 years ago

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.

rafski• 13 years ago

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…

Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense

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