Comment by nine_k
1 day ago
Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.
Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.
Just think of the data mining they could have had there.
They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…
They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
This would require the decision-maker to think and act at the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-impact, unprofitable service."
Yes, Google killing Reader was probably the first time they killed a popular product and what started the idea that any Google product could be killed at any time.
There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.