Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem | Hacker News Reader

Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem

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83 pointswatchdogtimer73 comments

Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum.

There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed.

Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because of Apple's behavior. I doubt it.

At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type of technology that I expect will be influential.

There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead ends.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as adopters.

> There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed.

... and nobody's Newton disappeared.

In fact, you can still find one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Newton-Original-MessagePad-OMP...

This is the major difference between cloud architectures and DRM-licensed media that you rent, versus actual products that you own.

True, but regardless, a not inconsiderable part of the value of a Newton died when the platform came to the end of it's life. A betamax machine or an HD-DVD player may still exist, but that does not mean a lot for their owner.

The people who bought VHS instead of Betamax aren't getting a lot of value from their systems at this point either. And I've bought, used, and thrown away multiple DVD players over the years.

Point of order: the hypothetical HD-DVD player to which @msabalau refers is not a standard DVD player, as you seem to have assumed. HD-DVD was a format iteration meant to compete with Blu-ray. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD

Oh. I was carelessly assuming it was a competitor to standard DVDs. Thanks for the correction, and no worries. I'll probably throw out multiple Blu-Ray players before I'm done as well. :)

Point of information: that was a point of information, not a point of order.

A point of order would be something like pointing out that someone replied under the wrong parent.

Haha - fair enough. Thanks for the correction's correction.

Isn't it a point of order to say that somebody incorrectly called a point of order?

I believe this to be a category error. The Newton is not a technology with a format that died with it. If it was no longer possible to press the buttons or use the screen on a Newton, or that you could only create lists of things that existed in the 90s, the comparison would be more apt.

There was some 3rd party development of applications, and presumably there would have been more if the Newton had thrived. But, fair point, it was mostly a product, and just potentially a platform.

> ... and nobody's Newton disappeared.

More importantly, Newtons weren't distributed for free, shutting down the development of a nascent trade in handheld computers designed for sale.

We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the following Google headline:

Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain competitiveness and re-ignite growth.

Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat!

Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday, Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway. Hopefully, it won't be too late.

Google swing back? I doubt it. Once they crossed over into a billion+ company, their mission became to be a billion+ company. That they still organize the world's information, or claim to do whatever they did in the past, is just momentum that will bleed off.

They make money. That's all they do. Nothing wrong with that, but they're never going to be what they were. Their future is to be General Electric, or Comcast, or HP in their declining years. The difference between HP and Google is acceleration; the days of Bill and Dave are remembered wistfully, as they were not there for the decline and destruction.

The days of Page Rank and Labs and excitement are dead and gone, as are the human days of Lestat, never to return.

The Google Reader furore reached embarrassing levels of absurdity days ago. I have attempted many times to formulate my feelings on the matter into words (for the sake of balance if nothing else) so here goes nothing:

The rage about the death of reader has been engendered and encouraged by over-zealous bloggers and early adopters, who placed a personal agenda ahead of sensible appraisal of events. A breach of the trust placed in them by the wider user base who look to them for guidance.

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Their temper tantrum has achieved several things:

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- Underscoring the severe issues with citizen journalism, where influence and weight is placed in the words of those who have no code of ethics or conduct to adhere to. I was particularly taken aback by what I consider to be an unprofessional article by Om Malik: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/sorry-google-you-can-keep-it-to...

- Riding roughshod over the launch of interesting Google products such as Keep and The Drive API. Ironically the people who say they would not use Keep because they could not trust it to be around in x years time are arguably the ones who, by drowning launch coverage in unrelated negative feedback, contribute most to the likelihood of that outcome. In this way - the prophecy becomes self fulfilling, and a lot of self-important people get to pat themselves on the back for 'getting it right'.

- Highlighting the reality that almost no tech products live on in the same form ad infinitum. Old systems built upon old technologies make way for new systems built upon new technologies. This iterative process has long been the life blood of the developing platform that is the internet. This is a good thing - this process gave us Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Maps, Foursquare & Reddit from the ashes of such things as MySpace, Digg, MultiMap & Alta Vista. Far worse would be the continued life of an old and increasing unused technology to pander to a small but influential community. Doing that would be a waste of Google's engineering talent and by extension a disservice to it's wider user base. IE 6 anyone ?

- Highlighting the need for data portability and transparency. This is a good thing - In my opinion the only good thing to come out of this childish whining session. The thing is, Google already caters to this need as well as any, and far better than most, major internet tech firms. Therefore is doesn't seem rational or sensible to lynch them on these grounds either.

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The aforementioned temper tantrum has notably NOT achieved one thing:

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- Persuading Google to continue to actively support and develop Google Reader.

Some facts to finish off:

Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders.

It makes good business sense for Google to frequently kill off experiments. Allowing them to re focus engineering talent on yet more experiments.

Everyone enjoys the innovations that come from Google's experimental culture (G-Mail etc...). However - Google are not prescient ... they cannot always accurately predict what will be useful to the widest audience along the path to their eventual goal of making all the word's information accessible. In order to be right some of the time, Google, like everybody else, has to be wrong some of the time too. If they did not recognise when they were wrong and account for it then their pace of innovation would grind to a halt under the weight of their own legacy support.

When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.

RSS was and is a dead technology. Bloggers telling me otherwise (no matter how loudly, and with what ridiculous hyperbole) is akin to musicians telling me that the CD is still alive and well. I don't care ... neither do most other people ... HMV is still shutting down!

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I desperately hope that someone with a louder voice than I possess manages to get some traction when they inevitably say: "Go home internets, you're drunk."

I don't know what people mean when they say RSS is a dead technology, but it solves a problem for which I know no other solution: reading blogs or other websites that are very rarely updated and are about unpopular topics. If a website only has new content every few months on average, I don't want to visit it manually: if I visit to often I waste my time, if I try to visit infrequently I'm likely to forget about the website. I definitely want to know when its been updated before visiting. If it were one some popular topic I could probably find out about it from social media, but if it has a narrow readership this is less likely.

You are right I suppose - perhaps then my analogy would be better suited to describing RSS as a niche technology. The issue is that niche technologies work in conjunction with a paid business model. Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more.

   Google's core business model is that of mass market and driving eyeballs to ads. Reader did not fit within the confines of their model any more.

So we should all look forward to Keep, Drive, Maps, Docs, Now, Glasses, Self Driving Cars and their many other products being discontinued sometime soon ?

If they are not successful then yes. That is exactly what I am saying. However by choosing Google's most popular products your point is both self defeating and an exercise in "reductio ad absurdum".

Maps is an area of core competency for Google, has huge commercial implications and is a dependency of many other products. Maps is as safe as anything bar Search.

Drive (and by extension Docs and Keep because they all form part of the same umbrella product) is an attempt by Google to compete for the traditional Corporate business stamping Grounds of MS. It also has an API. It would be reasonable to assume that Google will continue to support Drive for at least a long as it has relevance in this area.

As For Glasses and Self Driving Cars - the only products on your list to which your point could sensibly apply - YES. If they do not work. If nobody (and by nobody I mean insufficient volume. A few thousand early adopters is nobody in the numbers of Google) uses them then they would be deemed a failure. In this case it would be clear that that product was not quite what the market wanted at that time - Google should absolutely shut it down in order to continue to innovate and experiment.

Heres the thing: Its still a good thing that these experiments happen at all! One of the great adages of science is that negative results are still results.

How would you like it if Google discontinued Gmail ? Because that's what Reader is like it to me and many others. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean others don't.

And I fail to see what is "interesting" about Keep/Drive. Both are poor copies of products that have been around for years.

If gmail died I would use hotmail.

You and many other still isn't enough to justify the continuation of a free product. THATS the point. Gmail has something like 150 million active users so it wont close. If it's user base ever dropped to 10s of thousands then I would expect Google to close it. I wouldn't mind because I could get my data - and would already be in the other 149+ million USING SOMETHING ELSE.

>Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders.

I seriously doubt the shareholders were going to be pissed off at Google if Reader were continued. And interests of shareholders is not a black and white thing, for example CostCo pays and treats their workers better than Walmart does. They don't have a legal responsibility to reduce all possible expenses for the sake of profits. The executive leadership has considerable leverage in running a company.

>When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.

That doesn't make much sense. Google has $48 billion cash on hand and made $2.1 billion in net income in just the last quarter. The big companies run a lot of things that are not directly profitable but give them goodwill and a halo effect of staying in the ecosystem.

On the first point, yes, this is a frequent misunderstanding of the law. The management of a company has a general fiduciary duty to shareholders, but does not have any kind of narrow legal obligation to maximize profits, certainly not over any specific timeframe. They have quite large leeway to make decisions on the basis of whatever strategy they think is correct, and they may value things such as "customer loyalty" and "brand perceptions" in whatever way they see fit. If Google's management decided, for example, that it was important for their reputation that they stand behind their products long-term, and therefore that nothing would be shut down except in extraordinary circumstances, there'd be no legal problem with adopting that policy, even if it lost money short/medium-term. That's simply a strategic decision, which might be wise or unwise, but which courts have no authority to second-guess. Shareholders could vote out the board if they disagree with it, but there would be no violation of fiduciary duty.

I am not suggesting the the law is black and white. Nor am I saying that there is anything codified as law that would require Google to do anything so specific as moth ball reader. The decision to mothball reader (rightly or wrongly) was clearly a business decision: Google obviously felt it could better serve its user-base as a whole (and by extension its shareholders) by distributing its time and LOCs in other ways. The reason I brought up the law was in support of the general point that Google has every right to distribute its finite time and resources with this tenet in mind.

If they chose to keep Reader going it would be purely on the basis that its niche user base is somewhat influential, and might have some success on the future success of their products. That is not in service of it's wider user bases' interest.

On the second point:

So where does it stop? If Google continued to support Reader as a niche product with no scale, no monetisation and a dropping user base should it not continue to support other applications as well ? Should Buzz and Wave et al not still be alive and well ? Little pebbles ... and all that.

The reason I say you cannot have your cake and eat it to is that NO company, NO matter its size or success, can perpetually continue to experiment at the rate Google does if they intended to support every product they made forever.

I'm really starting to get annoyed at the whole "whelp, Google Reader died, therefore everything else is unsafe" mantra being carried by the tech industry as of late. Sure, it was worth mentioning early in the game (and more importantly once), but at this point it's become a bandwagon.

The press is declaring Google Reader a sign of things to come, but for the average user this has little effect. If we assume Google wasn't lying, and the users were dropping off, it makes sense for them to cut off a product that wasn't being actively developed in the first place. I'm a Reader fan, and I hate that it shut down, but that's beside the point - Google is trying to build new, better products, not let old ones fester without support or development.

This doesn't even tackle the fact that Keep isn't a true Evernote competitor. It's more of a supplement/addition to Evernote. For once, a Gizmodo article is relevant here: http://gizmodo.com/5991723/6-obvious-evernote-features-googl...

You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

And there has been this assumption with Google that they would keep their APIs available. Especially for something a innocuous as an RSS API. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

> You are missing the point. Google Reader was also an API.

A hacked up, reverse-engineered API. Since it was never official they haven't actually broken any promises.

Google has killed APIs before. Examples include Google Translate and private weather API.

I'd call it less of a bandwagon, and more of a tipping point. Google has killed lots of little services, beloved or otherwise, in addition to all the acquihires by various tech giants.

Google Reader has simply become a focal point for the closures of so many beloved products and services, because it's so comparatively ubiquitous that an abundance of nerds and literati are all sharing the same frustration simultaneously.

Though I'm also skeptical about trusting new Google products, I think the real lesson is being skeptical in general. If a product isn't part of a company's core business, and/or the business model is unsustainable or user-hostile, go in with eyes open, and ensure you have an exit strategy.

It's always better to be pleasantly surprised that a service is around than shocked when it shuts down. I agree in that the lesson should be to be skeptical, because it prevents people from being complacent with their information. I'd much rather pay for Reader or similar services from Google, but that would easily attract hate from the "Google always made free products" stance that's circulated around a lot.

Even if Google doesn't go back from killing Reader, they've seen the response that this particular shutdown has caused. It would be suicide for them to do it again (especially in this manner), so I reckon they'll be more cautious next time. Then again, fool me once...

Services that sell DRM'd content whose value isn't intrinsically linked to a particular device deserve extreme caution. Other than that, I can't really see a problem if you can take your content elsewhere.

It's not only about Google Reader.

Did you see this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5374625 ?

I'm well aware of the other Google products killed during Spring/Fall cleaning runs, but they were all in a similar state of abandonment. It would be a worse practice to let old products sit by the wayside without development, yet be forced to keep them barely alive on life support. They aren't going to kill off Gmail, for example (though I have my doubts about something like Google Voice).

What about killing off Blogger? That competes with Google+

I wouldn't really call it a "mantra" and I think it's a legitimate concern.

[1] Google already built a product similar to Keep, it was called "Notebook" and it was shut down after five years.

[2] If you really believe Google and think that declining traffic is a legitimate reason for closing Reader, then surely Google+ should have been on the chopping block much earlier than Reader.

The Economist does a much better job than I could of explaining why we should be worried about Google's willingness to close products as beloved as Reader: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/utilitie...

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep...

[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/google-reader-still-sends-...

1. Yep, I'm aware of Notebook. At the same time, though, notebook was built on an aging stack and had no mobile presence when it was killed. Keep can either be considered a rehash or a reboot of it, but it's a new take on the idea. I'm still trying it out for myself, but I've at least found it partially more helpful than Notebook for mobile use.

2. Google+ won't be killed, because it's a social layer that's built into Google. It isn't a singular product, but is baked into everything Google is doing now that involves social. Sure, at this point in time, it appears that the service is fairly low - but where was Twitter 20 months after launch? I might be playing a "Google card" here, but it's still a relatively new social network, compared to its competition.

I only wish that if they were going to launch further products, they'd tag them "beta," like they did in the past. That way, if they shut them down, it would at least make sense from a "well, it was a trial" standpoint.

The thing about Reader is that its appeal - while limited - was limited to a disproportionately influential segment of the internet. This made its shut down stupid for two reasons.

The first is that RSS's well-established failure to go mainstream meant that it was both a minor and clearly contained "threat" to advertising revenue. The second was that the people who did rely on it heavily are among the best sources of free publicity around. These are the people who take it upon themselves to deal with the fire hose head on, to filter for the best, and to promote their discoveries as widely as they can. And given that Google's entrance into the feed-synching sphere had driven every one else out, their departure left no clear replacement. Essentially, Google waded into the most vocal room in the world, replaced the infrastructure with their own, then shut the whole thing down without any apparent remorse or regret. And that left a lot of very noisy people in the lurch.

Basically, keeping Reader going was the cost of keeping the blogsphere happy. Having hit these people where it hurts, they can now expect to suffer a steady stream of sentiment saying "Google isn't trustworthy". For a business that is unusually dependent on a public perception of trustworthiness, this seems especially undesirable.

If a good substitute for Reader appears in the coming months, the problem may be a passing one. But if it doesn't, the lack will be keenly felt. And as long as bloggers, reporters, and other high-volume traffickers are feeling that pain, Google can expect to lose the benefit of the doubt anytime trust comes up. And even if a good replacement does emerge, Google loses the benefit of having potential critics dependent on (and enamored of) something that they - and they alone - were providing.

If Reader users were dropping off because Google crippled Reader, then the "users were dropping off" argument lacks teeth, though it does make for a great self-serving justification. First you make the product worse, then you point out that people aren't using it as much, then you kill it.

(This is, incidentally, the sort of strategy Republicans have w/r/t public services: they want people to think public services suck, so they start defunding or corrupting the relevant offices. Then the services become worse. This becomes a justification for more defunding or just shutting the things down.)

Google killed all its RSS support at once. Most people don't understand RSS anyway, so maybe this was a good thing. This doesn't make me worry any more than usual about their other products.

I have had the businesses of my customers and my own projects set back when 5 Google services were dropped.

No one can predict ahead of time what will be a success, and what won't. That's the beauty of making lots of bets, and having the fittest survive. There's no formula for success, no matter how many business gurus write articles saying otherwise. You try an experiment, you collect data, you iterate. You climb lots of mountains, sometimes you climb the wrong ones.

Google perceives itself as a technology company. Hire smart people, try lots of things, most of them will fail. Some will stick. What people are bashing Google over is what collectively, angels and venture capitals do every day, only this time, the venture capitalist is Google, and they are investing in oodles of their own internal projects.

Why do this? To avoid the Innovators Dilemma.

IMHO, the best thing we can do to guard against the downsides of disruption is to ensure transparency of data. You should expect products to die every couple of years. Reader outlasted most at 8 years. How long will Pinterest be around? Or Vine? Path?

The problem today is that most companies are not transparent, they are building siloed clouds, and so when they die, content dies with them.

Worse is non-textual data, like books, music, and film. Not only do you have siloed clouds, you have heavy use of DRM, which means purchases are non-transferrable, often even if the company themselves wants it to be.

The lesson is, invest your energy in supporting services with data transparency. Demand it. Not just from Google, but from Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al.

Besides search and gmail, I have no intention of ever using another Google offering again. I also now regularly back up up gmail using Thunderbird just in case Google does something stupid there as well.

Personally, I think if it weren't for Search and Gmail with its tie-in effect, people would have moved out of all other Google services a long time ago.

I do not like this new direction Google has taken since the past few product redesigns (Gmail, Google Groups, Image Search among others) where the products have gone from beautifully functional and feature rich to outright broken even for basic features. Groups has become absolutely unusable.

The Gmail redesign was a sore point and I customized it to be as close as it could be to the older design, but I expect them to break it further in the future.

> and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.'

This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the problem at hand.

Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's value in diversity.

It's easy to say that from a philosophical point of view, but it's preposterous from a business point of view. In an organization like theirs working on 1000's of different things at once, you can't keep expanding horizontally; you have to eventually cut your losses on certain things and re-allocate resources to things that DO work and get ROI.

Businesses, and pretty much any organized group, MUST prioritize their workload and not have a shit-show working on everything all at once.

> Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket

What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?

The speed w/ which Google deployed, and then discontinued Google Buzz discouraged the adoption of Google+ for many folks, myself included.

> Launched February 9, 2010 > Current status Discontinued December 15, 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

At least they open-sourced it and released a stand-alone version via the Apache Foundation. You can still use Wave, it's just called Apache Wave or Wave in a Box.

Google Reader has been active for 8 years. That's longer than most technology products. In addition, there are countless alternatives to choose from, and you can easily get your data out of Reader and move to one of those countless alternatives.

This whole thing has been so overblown. It's like everyone is bored or something.

I have hundreds of starred articles which unless someone makes a replacement for Google Reader is going to disappear come July. For me it's like losing years worth of bookmarks.

And I hope that you post the same thing if/when Google discontinues Google Mail.

I have a 7.39MB starred.json from my Reader takeout. And Feedly is showing saved articles from over four years ago (long before I tried Feedly the first time), so it probably imported them.

Well, strictly speaking, starred messages are included in OPML bundle that you can download. Even if you don't get complete replacement for GReader, you can still extract information from that file, it's just JSON.

Blogger seems like a direct competitor to Google+

Does it seem unrealistic to worry that Google might cut that? It is easy to export data from Blogger to other blogging systems (I just moved off of Blogger), so at least good for Google for making it easy to export data from their products.

The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.

Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services based on open standards.

Bashing Google seems silly...

I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for whom this is a niche side product.

really shocking to see the extent of myopia over at google, for 'smart people' they are acting incredibly dumb

I'd venture to say that this is all Larry Page. The start of this "myopia" seems to coincide with him taking over as CEO.

It actually started when Larry met Steve Jobs and was recommended he focus his efforts.

Ever since then it's been all about Google+ and finding new ways to force feed to everyone.

Let us now daydream about the possibility that Steve sabotaged Larry.

Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524

To be honest, Vic is also to blame for that one too.

Vic runs G+. It is his job to grow G+. The person who hired him for that job is responsible for deciding whether that job should exist.

Interesting. Quite possible since the attitude adopted by Larry Page is the same one Jobs reveled in: 'I know better than anyone, even millions of users.'

This is in contrast to Google's previous data driven method of decision making.

I firmly believe the opposite. To me, he is the one made Google focusing on what really matters for the future of the company. You need to make tough decisions sometimes and I think he was correct in "almost" all of them. (I have no affiliations with the company)

Wonder how long until they shut down Keep with everyone having put a lot into using it. We should start a web site for pooling bets...

5 years? Would that be enough? Or do you like using services for life? Especially ones of such little value and little tie-in as a note app. Most people would rather get bored with it and try something new than be upset about Google killing Keep in 5 years.

Did everyone forget about this? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...

I've attempted to stay away from Google products mainly because the customer service or support of their products is horrendous.

That being said, I wish they would either better evaluate the popularity of their products and monetize them, or simply not allow them out into the wild for people to use and then kill it a year later regardless of adoption.

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