61–70 of 215 posts
Serious question: Why no one offered to buy or take over the service? Like Google Wave - Apache Wave
Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.
Hire a few full-time engineers to maintain it, and you've still got many millions of dollars in annual revenue for something that already exists. Surely even a company Google's size would be better off not throwing that away in the interest of 'focus'. But hey, Larry is clearly smarter than I am, so presumably he knows what he's doing.
Heck, maybe he even realized that Reader had become an impediment to progress and removing it would be a net good (pun intended). The progress that's been made in just the past few months is certainly exciting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google's wants to know as much about me as possible. Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.
I always just assumed that they were using it to weight web page rankings, and that it probably paid off just for that reason alone. If a website has a lot of genuine RSS subscribers in Google Reader who read it regularly, then that shows a strong degree of trust in the source, and thus a good reason to rank it highly. You can't really mine social networking / emails for the same kind of information. Not unless every…
and before you ask no I have never used GMail
Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.
What they should have done is announced that they were killing it, then when the entirely predictable public outcry hit, 'listen to the community', and make it a paid service instead. From the numbers Feedly and Newsblur and such are picking up, it doesn't seem like a stretch that a paid version of Google Reader could have brought in at least $10M/year, even given the resulting loss of users. The only difficulty woul…
Taking a pure business centric view - We're not google's customers, advertisers are. If we paid for the service we would expect no advertising - and so google's customers would lose.
In future, G+ also dead like this....... RIP for GReader.....
Now if only Feedly will allow me some way to pay them...
Right up till the 11th hour I held out hope that Google would give Reader a last minute stay of execution. A sad day indeed.
What they should have done is announced that they were killing it, then when the entirely predictable public outcry hit, 'listen to the community', and make it a paid service instead. From the numbers Feedly and Newsblur and such are picking up, it doesn't seem like a stretch that a paid version of Google Reader could have brought in at least $10M/year, even given the resulting loss of users. The only difficulty woul…
Running a "service on the side" doesn't just cause "focus" problems for senior management. It creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which far outweigh the few million bucks of profit Google might make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What they should have done is announced that they were killing it, then when the entirely predictable public outcry hit, 'listen to the community', and make it a paid service instead. From the numbers Feedly and Newsblur and such are picking up, it doesn't seem like a stretch that a paid version of Google Reader could have brought in at least $10M/year, even given the resulting loss of users. The only difficulty woul…
> make it a paid service instead Taking a pure business centric view - We're not google's customers, advertisers are. If we paid for the service we would expect no advertising - and so google's customers would lose.
The fact that they shut it down suggests that it wasn't making millions of dollars from ads, so why not remove them and charge for it instead? As I said, the only real barrier would appear to be the reaction, which could be solved with a bit of manipulation, in fact spinning it into a PR positive.
I suspect the answer is that a few millions dollars a year is considered pocket change by Google, insufficient to waste time on. To me that reasoning seems shortsighted. Again though, it's likely that Larry Page's sight is in fact much longer than mine.