91–100 of 131 posts
Feels something like:
"We're sorry that we took away your child support benefits, but can you give us some feedback on how we can improve our social services to the community? (any feedback about the withdrawal of child support will be ignored). Child Support Services. We listen."
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 Googl…
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.
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You're totally right. Google should absolutely never, ever ask for input from users.
I understand this is sarcasm, but it seems in this case it would have been easier and clearer to express your point directly.
Or is this one of those cases where "lol u suk" is the preferred response?
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You realize this person almost certainly doesn't exist, right?
No, seriously can you elucidate? He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.
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 Googl…
> 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…
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.
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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…
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.
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.
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No, seriously can you elucidate? He could at least meet with someone who had worked on the project.
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 som…