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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Great move by Google. And a good bit of timing, considering the PR beating they've been taking the past couple of weeks. One wonders if that's simply chance, or if they pushed this out when they did because of all the other stuff.

I'm guessing it's the former, since it typically takes big companies a long time to pull something like this together and fully execute it.

In any case, it's a good step for Google to suggest that they DO still take openness seriously and are, more or less, still the "don't be evil" company we all came to know.

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This is (hopefully) related to the VP8/MPEG-LA patent licensing issue from a few days back. Remember that part of that announcement was that Google would be "soon" releasing the set of terms under which the licensed patents would be used. If these are those terms (and they aren't yet -- only MapReduce patents are mentioned), then this is fantastic news.

They published this website (linked, via another blog post, from this announcement) a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.google.com/patents/licensing/index.html

And that in itself is just part of ongoing stuff coming from Google, so as you suggest this is not the kind of thing you throw together in a moment.

Having said that, once you've put in the months/years to get to this stage, you do get to choose the timing of your announcements.

With all due respect to Reader, IMHO this announcement, viewed in the context of the legal battle that rages over software patents these days, is in a wholly different league.

Could you elaborate on the PR beating comment? I feel like I've been under a rock lately.

They announced that Google Reader would be shut down in June, but that you can export all your content and settings to other services.

Bloggers, journalists, and internet commenters started crying like 5-year-old children.

Google retired their very popular Google Reader app. They took a lot of bad press.

I suspect the parent is talking about the Google Reader shutdown and the flack they've been taking from the tech press.

Yes, but it wasn't just about Google Reader. A number of things happened (or hit the news) in a short period of time, all of which damaged Google's standing as the "Don't Be Evil Company" and hurt their credibility with hackers and people who care about things like the Open Web and Open Standards.

I'm not necessarily saying the backlash was (or wasn't) justified, but it was what it was, and I think this step by Google is a good thing in terms of earning them a bit more trust with that crowd. Whether that's something that actively care about, is anybody's guess.

As PR beatings go that one was pretty contained (mainly to the HN frontpage).

Agreed, but we're a different audience. As technical people, it is in Google's best interest to look "good" to us so we continue to use and develop things for their platforms. At least that's how I see it.

I didn't get that impression, at least for me it seemed to be all over Facebook and (oh, rich) Google News.

What are the "number of things"? As much as people are complaining about Reader, I don't see that as bad PR. I assumed it was something other than the Reader fallout.

This is simply chance. It has been in the works for a while. As you correctly surmised, things like this take a while.

(I am directly involved in this :P)

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