Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

It had an information dense UI and was super fast and snappy to load. It was basically like Gmail--always there, dependable, easy to scan and quickly digest information.

All of the competition at the time of its demise was complete and utter garbage (sorry Feedly, I loved ya but you were slow and super unstable in the early days). Nowadays there are some worthy alternatives but the damage is done and RSS is just getting more and more obscure and blogging outside closed platforms like Twitter is basically dead.

Reading that post you can really see how little Google cares about the end users. They are closing products and removing features without providing a replacement and providing ridiculously short timelines for changing.

Despite the prior “more wood behind fewer arrows” announcement, it might be the first time Google killed something that was popular with Googlers. I think it was an “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment for my friends on campus. Memegen was full of “we can launch (ultradoomed project) but can’t keep Reader alive?” snark, less good-natured than usual. I’ve heard it blamed on Vic and G+, actual security issues from scraping Javascript, or just falling behind on the promo-driven infra treadmill that threatens everything mature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750

I stopped having a positive view of Google due to their poor explanation for shutting down Google Reader.

They explained they were shutting it down due to declining usage and they are pouring all of their energy into fewer product, however, as Google had a reputation for building cool and free stuff back then, it seemed reasonable to me that they could have maintain it in a frozen state or provide a longer transition period. This invited alternative theories about intentionally killing RSS for Google+.

This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error.

Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would've been a no-brainer.

But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn't have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would've benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would've meshed well with it. That little Google "stuff you maybe want to see" panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like "hey, we think you like this site, there's a new article," and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.

Ultimately I have to assume that it's a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader's audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn't lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.