[panacea]

"discontinuing a product"

I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.

[icebraining]

What Google did, evil or not, was not EEE. The purpose of EEE was to kill only the competitors' product, not their own, by extending it and making everyone else incompatible with the new formats and/or protocols. That's not what Google did here.

[stcredzero]

> That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish, extinguish' thing

[OGinparadise]

Google did that to websites too: first they penalized a slew of sites such as local search, travel, finance, shopping comparison for having "shallow content," and then they introduced the Google versions of said sites, on top of everyone else on search results.

[cromwellian]

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites. When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because ultimately, search engines should be smart enough to understand the semantics of the search to an extern where a special curated vertical isn't needed anymore. When Jean Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for the nearest Starbase, it doesn't tell him to phone up StarBases.com and ask them for a list instead.

When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.

Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.

What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.

If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.

[OGinparadise]

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites.

Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typical of companies that gain a monopoly in a field. You can argue that they might have a right to do it, not that it is the right thing to do. If major websites go out of business, how is the web better off? Google produces no content and now wants to send no clicks to the producers.

>> When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it.

Yes, but Google decided that they have the best reviews and best price. Either way, they gained share by being nice and now they are on top, with lots of money to buy off protection from politicians. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/google-accumulat...

What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly.

Google clones everything and when those cloned go out of business, consumers lose. Any hope that they may charge $1 /month vanishes when Google clones their app /features.

Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.

Mozilla is one company, Google clones a product and uses it's billion users to have it adopted. Imagine if Microsoft used that muscle to have users adopt Bing or IE, by showing ads for them virtually each time you went online.

[cromwellian]

Vertical crawlers and linkfarms going out of business is different than publishers going out of business. The web's fertile lifeblood is content, federated, distributed, content accessible by URL. I worry more about newspapers going out of business than comparison shopping sites or RSS readers that never could charge $1 per month, that's nostalgia for a history that never existed.

The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.

There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.

If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.

Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.

[Apocryphon]

People seem to be clamoring for subscriptions to ostensibly free services that come at a cost, whether it's the threat of cancellation or restrictive use of their APIs. That's why App.net got so much buzz, remember?

[OGinparadise]

What I said is a problem simply because of Google's market power, power they got by behaving differently. You don't care if people pay on everything they find through Google simply because that benefits Google. You also don't seem to care if Google, with 70%-99% market share penalizes competitors in search.

With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.