Comment by aniket_ray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aniket_ray | Hacker News Reader

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Off OP's topic but I find this post on every HN post about Google launching something and frankly this post adds little value to the discussion.

Google Reader is dead and it's not coming back. Reader usage was extremely low and it made no business sense for Google to run it. If Reader actually had enough users, Google wouldn't have shut it down. Many entrepreneurs, including me in the past, have had to take this decision to shut our services because they did not have enough traction. Failure is part of taking a risk and you should be more appreciative of the risk.

I was angry at the Reader shutdown too as I was an avid Reader user. I was quick to switch to Feedly but lately I find myself being infrequent checking my RSS feed. I seem to be getting more and more of my news from techmeme and hacker news. When I talk to tech friends about this, it seems the they were already doing this. The rest of the world had already moved on and I was just late to realize this.

Was I angry at first? Yes. Am I still angry? No.

PS: I'm an engineer at Google right now.

The comment was not just about Reader - it is about fact: http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/

What fact? The fact that out of hundreds of services, they shut down 12? Even 37signals shut down some of their products and they have very few. Also, this list features google maps api v2 and v1, come on, this is ridiculous. I also see plenty of stuff no one used or that were replaced by services that everyone enjoy (google video by youtube).

They have shut down (among others) Code Search, Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Listen, Google Reader, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, Google Spell, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Google Search API, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.

Half of those were replaced with better products, and most of the rest were things nobody actually used.

The "Google kills all their products" whisper only started with Reader because it's awfully hard to get anyone mad about the shutdown of Sidewiki or audio ads.

Funnily enough, I actually originally compiled that list long before Reader got shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666 I just added a few more recent things to it since then. So some of us at least were pointing out what was going on long before Reader.

As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures that really caused a storm.

You should at least do some basic searches on these before asserting them. After said "storm", the Translate API was not shut down as originally announced. It became a paid API[1]

[1] https://developers.google.com/translate/

I'm well aware of what happened. Making it paid was as good as closing it for a lot of the free services that were using it.

The point was that a lot of people were upset about it when the closure was announced, and thus we can see that people have been getting annoyed at Google for closing things down since well before Reader was shut. This is counter to the claim of the Google employee above that everybody loved it when Google canned products before Reader.

A lot of those still exist, just not in quite the same way that they did before or as part of other products. It's a bit dishonest to pretend that all of the functionality in the products you listed above isn't still available (for example, there might not be a "Google Dictionary" product anymore, but Google provides dictionary definitions directly as a part of Google Search simply because it makes a lot more sense to users).

If you took everything Google did and made each of them a separate startup, the vast majority would fail. Just because a new business venture is attached to an old one doesn't mean it's not a new business venture with similar risk of failure.

Just as a heads up, The .idea directory shouldn't be checked into your repo. Timeline project looks really cool though.

Add this to your gitignore: http://gitignore.io/api/intellij

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