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cs702

This is the evolution of "embrace, extend, and extinguish," a successful tactic used by Microsoft for many years.[1]

I'm calling it "embrace, give away, and extinguish."

(For most non-techies, RSS is now history.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Edit: added "(For most non-techies..."

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Embrace, extend an extinguish applies even more to Google's killing support for CalDAV in favor of it's own protocol now that pretty much everyone is using Google Calendar.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Only where Microsoft at least still cared about keeping it's (corporate) customers happy (and therefor providing some long term certainty), the only customers Google cares about are advertisers. They will ruthlessly kill off whatever doesn't suit them.

Being the product in Google's universe will suck worse than being the reluctant consumer in Microsoft's universe.

RSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to use Facebook and Twitter.

Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.

RSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs.

It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.

People I know who ask me why this mattered and why I used it seem to understand it when I explain it this way: Imagine being able to know when your favorite websites are updated, what that update is, follow the blogs or articles of your favorite writers, and not be limited to what some strangers decided they thought was kewl and up or downvoted.

A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.

Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.

Are podcasts dead? Without RSS, Podcasts would not exist.

Certainly not. iTunes (among others?) serves a ton of podcasts to techies and non-techies alike.

In the original EEE, the only extinguished products would be the competitors', not Microsoft's. The point was to capture market share, and that doesn't quite work if you eliminate yourself as well.

And Google never really "extended" either. They didn't add new fields to RSS or made it incompatible in any way. The proof is that I was able to move to Tiny in 5 minutes using Google's own export tool.

For most non-techies, RSS (and Cloud Reader) never existed - they never even heard of it, much less used it. It's not "now" history.

RSS has simply been reinvented for non-techies in the forms of Facebook and Twitter.

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