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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Considering the shitfits people were going into over Reader being eliminated, you'd think people would be a little more cautious about giving Google the keys to the kingdom on things as crucial as calendaring, contacts, and mail. Which is why the original article was a pretty good summation for me of why I'm not going to go Android any time soon, personally.

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I think the Reader shutdown is actually an example of why I am fine going into the Google ecosystem. Marco talks a lot about lockdown, but I haven't experienced it. Reader's shutdown was pretty abrupt, but I am happily using The Old Reader (minus the shutdown scare and less than stellar uptime) the same way I used Google Reader. Sure, I'd prefer Reader to still be around, but overall the transition was easy and pain free. I trust if the same thing were to happen to Gmail, Calendar, or Contacts I would have the same experience. And meanwhile, being in the Google ecosystem while it still runs makes my day to day life much better.

The only product that would concern me is Voice, and even then I believe a suitable replacement would pop up and Google would provide a relatively easy transition.

None of the services you listed at Google are going to cause me problems to pull my data out if I need to move somewhere else on short notice.

It was so, so easy to move on from Reader, which is why I think the shutdown was not such a big deal.

Google gave months of advance warning, and made it easy to export your feeds and data in a cross platform, open format. The fact that their API was open for other clients to use meant there was already an (admittedly limited) ecosystem of feed-reader UI apps that could pick up where they left off, such as Feedly and TheOldReader.

You lost a good product when Reader shut down, but you didn't lose the kingdom by any means

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