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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

> Super smart view. What's worse is when google (or other FAANGs) gets into a new product area, it in-effect suppresses development in the marketplace because very few people are brave/stupid enough to challenge a trillion dollar behemoth.

Is that actually true though? Googles forays into many markets were usually so horrible and clumsy that better companies could just use the media attention garnered to push their superior products.

Most Google beta products usually lack fundamental features, are geoblocked and completely ignore user voice. I haven't seen many of them really thrive over their better managed competition.

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I think it's possible for both statements to be true at the same time.

A small company with a successful, functioning project is getting a little bit of traction when Google crashes into the market. Google bids up staff costs, uses free advertising to get customer mindshare, scares off the small company's possible investors, and acts as a huge distraction.

After stumbling around for a while, Google gives up, but in the meantime, they've put the small company out of business.

Of course, the small company might get extra attention which they can use to their advantage, but it will be hard.

They also don’t always leave the market otherwise. When they shut down Reader there was an opportunity for their competitors except that their exit told everyone that feeds were dead and you needed to jump onto Google+ (their poorly considered plan) or Facebook (anyone seeing what Google was afraid of).

Depending on the market and the company’s resources that kind of image shift can have a big effect.

I am sure not everyone agrees with me, but I believe Google single-handedly killed RSS by first creating Google Reader and using their power to make it ubiquitous and then killing it when there was no competition left.

Don't forget about removing native RSS support from their browser. Combined with the knock on effects of other browsers removing support "because Google did it" or "because Google Reader is the de-facto RSS reader" hurt RSS even more.

I am not sure where this "RSS is dead" keeps coming from, but I still use it quite happily every day.

For sites that offer it, sure. I use it frequently with podcasts too.

But the number of sites, and the easy availability of readers for it (it was built into all of the major browsers at one point), have both decreased dramatically since the early naughts. If 10% of sites offer RSS feeds, I'd personally be quite surprised.

I know there are alternatives, but Google Reader just worked for me and I'm still, to this day yet, quite salty that they killed it.

There was never as many options as today for reading RSS before Google Reader went away. Killing it opened the market and we got innovation.

I don't believe it's entirely google's "fault" for the downfall of RSS.

Websites tend to not like to have RSS support due to it directing traffic away, and thus, denying ad revenue. It also allows easier aggregation from competitors/third-parties, which also denies ad revenue. Therefore, RSS is, at most, implemented as a short excerpt, with the intention to direct the user to visit the website.

I think the concern is best understood with products like Chrome, AMP, and Android, not these ephemeral ventures Google typically likes to do.

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