Liz Gannes at AllThingsD has an interesting perspective on the Google Reader shutdown. According to her sources, the shutdown was motivated by concerns over compliance – especially privacy. She explains how every product team needs compliance officers, and that Google was unwilling to create such an infrastructure for Google Reader. “The context for this concern about compliance is Google’s repeated public failures on privacy due to lack of oversight and coordination. It’s pretty clear why Page is trying to run a tighter ship.”
Google so noble. Even when they fuck users they do so for noble reasons. After all Google have been champions of privacy for a long time, it’s what their whole business is based on, respecting privacy.
An alternative view of the new Google from an ex-insider.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-go…
Troll harder…
I believe this should be it’s own article.
It seems like what has really changed at Google is their attitude towards litigation. Before, it was about getting cool stuff out and moving on to the next cool thing. But due to lawsuits across the world and governments increasingly trying to police the internet, that is no longer possible. In order to offer a service or software, you need to have the money and resources to protect it as well as run it. That means that it needs to have a business case(usually revenue).
It^aEURTMs sad, but true. Start ups can get away with more, but the bigger the company the bigger the target on their head. Remember what happened to Google TV? Lots of content providers allow their shows to be streamed on ^aEURoePCs^aEUR, but purposely blocked them on Google TV. Google^aEURTMs name was involved and they saw dollar signs.
Sadly for all the hand wringing about ^aEURoesocial^aEUR, they could have made something out of reader.(and still could)
But when it comes to privacy, is it really that hard to stay out of trouble? All the ways the article mentions that Google screwed up, even I could’ve told them those things were a bad idea, had they just asked me. Hell, maybe Google should hire me
I mean, driving down the street and slurping public wifi data? It doesn’t take a privacy lawyer to figure out that doing that kind of thing is gonna piss people off.
And just like the naming of CPUs and such… it’s fascinating to me how companies can take a concept that’s so simple to comprehend and make it so goddamned complicated.
That may be the case, but it would be nice if they could at least be open about it. The claims of “declining usage” is just such obvious bullshit as to be insulting to their users. If they want to shut it down because it’s unprofitable, they should just come out and say so.
I don’t mean to point out the obvious but a company of Google’s size and resource can certainly afford to assemble a privacy team for a reasonably popular product.
I am not suggesting the article is untrue but I do think that, ultimately, what killed Reader was a lack a strategic value.
I am/was an avid Reader user – I used Reader through my apps though – and I actually almost never logged into the thing. I can’t imagine Reader provided any value to Google and so it makes sense for Google to bin it rather then spending more cash on it.
On the other hand I think canceling Reader sends a real bad message to Goggle users. No way am I going to use their new note taking app now because if it does not make them enough money they will cancel it. In contrast Evernote is only about their note taking app and so I cam more confident that company will do everything they can to keep it going.
It boils down to the fact that if they wanted to monetize Reader they would have to index or scan content in some way, so they could make money through advertising. That’s where the privacy concern arises.
However, let’s not forget that Google made Reader free and eliminated all competition by doing so. Once they realised they weren’t going to make a fortune out of it they threw it out.
Not cool man
Competition was eliminated? Competition is holding out strong. Reader is simple and nothing more, there are a lot of free RSS aggregators…(Feedly being one of them)