Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanspecies | Hacker News Reader

The fuss is about Google embracing/extending and then suffocating every WWW technology they can't shove at least 20 ads into.

View on HN

Had Google actually even "embraced" RSS? I would say no. Reader isn't one of their core products and never was.

It wasn't a core product even when gmail had a prominent link to it at the top of the window? http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-more-...

Do you call everything that has an advertisement for it somewhere else a "core product"?

By "somewhere" you mean "at the top of every Gmail page"? Then yes, I'd figure that something Google prominently displays at the top of every Gmail page is probably pretty important to them.

I mean... when something is widely displayed in the middle of a list of things that includes

* Gmail

* Google Docs

* Google Calendar

* Google Photos

* Google Search

and nothing else, then I would naively consider it to be roughly as "core" as the other things on the list. You wouldn't? Why not?

I've never thought about a definition of a "core product" before, but it seems to me that it would be something that the company takes seriously, dedicates a lot of time on, and consciously depends on for user retention and growth. I don't think Reader fit any of those descriptions, and the placement alongside actual core products was an advertisement - a hope that it might become something more, but it never did.

Such as?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com