[danilocampos]

So, what's going to happen, exactly?

"Influencers" who liked Google Reader, now jilted, are going to use their magic influence beam to halt the growth of Android, to erode the dominance of Google in search, and prevent the regulatory approval of self-driving cars?

Google has quite a few heavy responsibilities on their hands. They have to manage growth and competition in hugely complex, emerging fields.

The lesson they learned correctly was that focus is essential. RSS is dead. A handful of nerds enjoy it, it solves a handful of problems, but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.

So they cut it and they're not even going to notice it in the rearview mirror.

In an amusing, if anecdotal, aside – Gina Trapani, an OG nerd influencer if ever there was one, tweeted that she'd checked out of Google Reader long ago.

https://twitter.com/ginatrapani/status/312451705692385280

[xaa]

Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service.

To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Reader, Blogger, etc, etc -- so that people would begin to use their Google ID as a significant component of their online identity. These services were never supposed to be profitable, they were supposed to provide a competitive "moat" for search.

If people begin to take their data out of Google services -- which is the only rational response given Google's repeated and blatant disregard toward its "customers" -- these customers might start looking toward Bing and DDG very soon. Then Google will have a problem.

Even Android could have a problem if people begin asking the question, "what happens if/when Google sunsets Play? Will I still have access to my apps?"

[danenania]

"Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service."

Google's dominance in search has nothing to do with customer switching costs. They are dominant because, imperfections and privacy issues aside, they legitimately have the best performing search engine on the market. They are able to retain this position because search is an extremely difficult and resource intensive technical problem (like mapping), that nobody has been able to credibly challenge them on since they took over.

If someone builds a better search engine than google, then yes, their position will be precarious, regardless of the other ways they've roped people in. But none of the current crop of competitors give any reason to believe this is imminent.

[danilocampos]

They built Gmail. People need it desperately. So far, no one distrusts it or has any reason to. That's their identity moat.

[stephenr]

People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail.

To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.

Search and the collaborative part of google docs (ie multiple concurrent editors on a document) is the only thing where it's hard to find a true competitor that you can self host, not to mention hosted solutions.

[danilocampos]

>People don't need gmail. They need email. You know, that thing that existed for years before gmail. To say people don't distrust google/gmail shows your naïveté and/or your rose coloured google glasses.

Aren't you a charmer.

I'm about as far from a Google fanboy as exists. Trust in this conversation has been about existing tomorrow or not. No one doubts Gmail is going to exist tomorrow.

And while you're right about the very obvious assertion that email existed before Gmail, that misses the point. There's a switching cost involved in changing your email. You have to inform all your contacts, update all of your accounts, learn a new web interface.

It's a damn good moat.

[anigbrowl]

I used to think that way, back when I had a Yahoo account. Now, lots of people could clone GMail and I wouldn't switch, because it's a decent service and pretty sticky. But on those infrequent occasions when I encounter a product that's a Big Leap Forward, I just migrate.

Search is the moat for me. Switching email is not nearly as big of a deal.

[stephenr]

If you're using a gmail domain email, setup auto reply/forwarding for a few months/indefinitely.

Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.

[ufo]

If you forwards emails through gmail then Google still gets your data.

[smsm42]

I use gmail daily, many times, but I don't actually need gmail site. I rarely even go there. What I need is a free and reliable mail storage server that supports IMAP. I'll take it from there. Same with GReader - I need free and reliable feed aggregator, and then I'll use the tools to consume it.

I am sad Google is getting out of this market, since that brings me inconvenience of migration. But I'm sure the niche will be filled in.

[bjustin]

The cost of switching may be low but familiarity is a powerful motivator to stay. We saw this with Office 2007 drawing so much ire despite the ribbon interface being quite good. We're seeing it again to an extent because of the don't-call-it-Metro interface in Windows 8.

[zanny]

> RSS is dead

What other technology is pervasively available to subscribe to discretized rich text articles, that will automatically fetch new entries, and maintain a history of viewed / favorited articles?

RSS serves a very critical function on the Internet - automated retrieval of content from dedicated sources picked by a user.

It was never a "platform" or a business model. It is syndication. The end. Everything from blogs, to videos, to art galleries, to music artists, benefit greatly from providing automated syndication to their content. So RSS will always have a place.

[saraid216]

Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.)

What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.

[danilocampos]

> So RSS will always have a place.

Indeed,

> but it's not a hot technology around which you can build a business on the scale that will move needles for Google.

[Daniel_Newby]

Not a hot technology? It is widely used by science and technology leaders who have to stay on top of the literature in their field. We're talking heads of $10M research programs, principal investigators, conference organizers, and so forth.

Google could have kept it around just to sell Apps to C*Os. "Apps is like Reader for secretaries."

[oliverhunt]

The point is that the 'influencers' will be aware of alternatives and are vocal about it. If you use a service of google's because there is another service of gooogle's that you use a lot - the tie is a lot looser, and when people are suggested alternatives it becomes a lot easier for them to move away.

While looking for a google reader alternative I ended up finding out about owncloud and now I use that to manage and sync my calendars and contacts across my devices, I also moved my domain email to zoho and infact the only service I am tied into of googles now is the android play store.

I used google apps for ages and had a free account before it got paid only (except that way of getting a 1 user apps account through some other google service) and I did that because it was so easy, and i reccomended it to anyone getting a domain.

That probably won't be the case any more.

So, I was in search of a new rss reader, and I had no intention of completely moving out of the google ecosystem, but I ended up finding a system that works better for me, and when people come to me (who come to me because 'i know tech' or whatever), and ask me what they should set up there new domain with, they will get a completely new answer.

This is just a personal story and i'm sure its not relevant to everyone but my point is that this move, and others, is damaging their brand and when you introduce people to RSS who have no idea what it is, and then you show them google reader and they love the fact they dont even need to make an account because they already have gmail, they love it. That is gone

Maybe my point is better illustrated by this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383495

[mkr-hn]

It made me look into Bing and the new Live. I like the web-based Office apps better than the Google equivalents, and Bing produces more of the kind of results I look for. I was among those who pushed Google early on, helped people get away from IE (to Firefox, and later Chrome), and talked up Gmail from the moment they let me in.

I won't ditch gmail for what it handles for now, but who knows what things will look like five years from now. Outlook's aliases are much easier to manage than a bunch of account+word@gmail pairs.

[smsm42]

I'm reading all these comments about "RSS is dead" and how everybody uses Facebook for it now and I'm completely confused. How you can even use Facebook for this? Facebook is totally useless as a reading list organizer, it is useful for sharing lolcats pictures, but if you need structure and organize known sources of information and keeping track of what you read and what you didn't - Facebook is as useful as a trombone in a Moon landing mission. The only conclusion I can make is that these people don't mean by reading the same thing as I do. Maybe for them lolcats and pics of each other's dinners is reading...

[wutbrodo]

When people say RSS is dead they're not saying its use case has been 100% effectively covered by another product/protocol. What they're saying is that people are using Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc as a replacement in the most basic sense: a feed of content that they can read. Whether you or I think that this is an adequate replacement for RSS is irrelevant because the assertion being made is that enough people think it is a good-enough replacement.

[philwelch]

It's because people don't read.

[SquareWheel]

I don't see how Gina is a good example. She's been a Twitter fan for a long time. There's too much overlap with GReader, so it makes sense she would pick one over the other. That doesn't make RSS "dead".

[snowwrestler]

Google's biggest risk from the press might be regulatory. Politicians and political appointees still pay close attention to the press, and Microsoft is always agitating in the background for an antitrust proceeding against Google. A pissed-off press corps might decide to "take a closer look" at the power Google wields in the online marketplace. This could help provide political cover to move against them.