101–110 of 354 posts
I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…
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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…
Remember Stadia? Google doesn't give a fuck about their users or customers. I would rather trust my money with Bernie Madoff than Google. I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they shutdown all my servers last friday. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution. Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...
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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 scrapin…
I haven't heard the phrase "more wood behind fewer arrows" before, but I am pretty sure that never in the history of the evolution of projectiles was that tradeoff ever taken in that direction.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-few...
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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…
Remember Stadia? Google doesn't give a fuck about their users or customers. I would rather trust my money with Bernie Madoff than Google. I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they shutdown all my servers last friday. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution. Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...
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But Wave was not a mature product when it was killed, it was still basically a tech demo. Killing it just wasn't as painful.
Indeed; it felt magical, but was a solution in search of a problem... which was ultimately found in Google Docs having very similar live editing ability.
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 sort…
> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.
For an RSS client i use the excellent Feeder
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
There's so much "that was the day Google died" sentiment in this thread, while in the same ten years the share price of GOOG has gone up from $19.87 to $90.63 (adjusting for splits), wildly outperforming the rest of the market. Goes to show that the company considers a much wider audience than just the tech crowd when making key product decisions.
You are confusing "the day Google died" with "the day the old Google died". For a long time there Google was a cool company that was more than just something to make money. It was doing all this other stuff that didn't make money but made the world better. These days it does about the same amount of "good" as any other company in the Fortune 100.