351–360 of 726 posts
Former Reader PM here, no longer at Google. Having fought many times to keep Reader alive, it's worth considering whether a large enough outcry would lead them to reconsider. White House Petition!
Perhaps the "decline in usage" had something to do with the thoughtless redesign they implemented.
I can't imagine the likely demographic profile of Google Reader users was worthless to a company that sells targeted ads as well.
"over the years usage has declined" That's because there was almost ZERO innovation done on this product. Very few (mostly visual) improvements, and very few new features. The latest posts on Google Reader blog are from 2011 http://googlereader.blogspot.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed on most points. And to be honest, if you're a real customer of Google (we use them for our business) you are treated worse than the "free service" (where you aren't the customer, you're the product). Our work accounts have a fraction of the functionality of our free accounts and the idea that this is somehow doing us a favor ("we only give you the very most stable of our services") is rather unconvincing.
What apps is this the case for? Our Google work stuff is identical to personal Google stuff as far as I can see.
Google Plus was as well.
Currently, I am waiting for Google Now's gmail integration to get on apps already: http://support.google.com/nexus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Those are just services that have/are affected/ing me; I'm certain there are plenty of other examples.
I've been a Google Reader user since the beginning, and have had an uneasy sense that this was coming for a while. I started building a replacement for it that fits my needs a couple months ago. It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com Here are my guiding principles: 1. It's going to cos…
| 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I think that you meant something else. Nobody "makes it up in volume." ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading epidemiological indicators). ISTM t…
As a stand-alone product, Google Reader could easily have justified continued investment and headcount. The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+). To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and tha…
I've been a Google Reader user since the beginning, and have had an uneasy sense that this was coming for a while. I started building a replacement for it that fits my needs a couple months ago. It's not ready yet, but I thought I might as well toss up a launchrock page and collect email addresses from other folks who might be interested: http://signup.viafeeds.com Here are my guiding principles: 1. It's going to cos…
| 'lose money on each customer, but make it up on volume.' I think that you meant something else. Nobody "makes it up in volume." ;)