I've always felt that the shuttering of Google Reader really was the end of an "age" of the web. We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups to the super closed gardens of the social platforms. F'ing painful.

You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it.

The worst of both worlds.

Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.

It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.

I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price.

...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...

The same strategy was pursued with Android. It was open-source, but Google set up the Open Handset Alliance with OEMs in 2007 and one of the membership stipulations were that OEMs could not create competing OSes based on forks of the open source code.

Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.

How Samsung stay on while selling Tizen OS?

Tizen is a Linux foundation project, it's not an Android fork. In any case, Samsung can always arrange for preferential treatment as they are the flagship OEM.

I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options.

It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.

> Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem

but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?

There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.

There were a lot more rss readers popping up and/or getting more attention immediately after Reader shut down. Feedly was one of the earlier winners for example.

Inoreader is good Google Reader replacement (at least for me).

Even if Google revived Reeder, I'd still use NewsBlur over it. Once burned, twice shy.

> We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups

I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)

And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!

RSS has changed as well. Earlier, the RSS feed could be the entire article or blog post. Then it changed to include ads. Then it changed to a snippet of the article or just the headline with some ads. Every change made it worse for usability.

I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.

The RSS didn't change. It's 100% on every content creator to decide what to include in an RSS item. Some decide to put only a snippet, hoping to lead you to their full website to show you ads. It has been this since the earliest days of RSS.

All three platforms you mentioned, Hugo, Blogspot and Wordpress have RSS enabled by default.

I feel like doing stupid comparisons right now. Feedbin, The Old Reader, or even running a feed aggregator on your own computer are like the sound of a tree falling in the woods. They're also not like The Matrix, because not only they can't be explained but the people who still complain about Google Reader don't understand them when they see them themselves.

yes, but all lack design that would inspire the mainstream. Being niche is fine but the reader was big with multiplicators like journalists etc.

You don't get them with wholemeal bread.

I use Feedly, which is pretty nicely designed (it has other drawbacks, but it looks and feels like a modern, proper app).

The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.

Inoreader provides more value than Feedly at a fraction of the costs.

I use Feedly’s free version, but thanks for the tip!

really?

end of Reader didn't kill blogging, Social Media killed blogging by effectively allowing anyone to blog with zero effort. FB and Twitter are or were where the majority of discussion was happening.

If it could be killed by the removal of a single app then it was not actually a viable culture in the first place.

> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.

Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.

What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?

From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.

I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.

That sounds like the stories we used to hear of Microsoft. It only took them like, what, 2 decades to get things back together?

It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal.

With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.

With mobile they lost on all the line.

I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.

You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.

It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world.

I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.

The amount of time we all spent getting the G+ unified-account thing through every system! But that and Photos are the two good results of the work.

I sometimes wonder if Mozilla conspires to drive Firefox into the ground.

But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.

Having Firefox around for just a few hundred million per year is convenient for Google to not have Chrome considered a monopoly (although Edge getting back the market somehow changes it). Anyway it feels like it would be stupid and potentially more costly for them to do moves to sabotage Firefox. It's like an insurance.

Good points.

But the big question is if there is an agreement or "understanding" or something that Google only pays as long as Firefox doesn't become a threat, i.e.:

- don't fix the plugin ecosystem

- don't fix theming

- don't get too far ahead technically (i.e. a good reason to get rid of the servo team)

- don't claim too much authority (i.e. get rid of MDN)

Of course this is wild speculation and mostly in jest.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Stupidity is malice when you are supposed to be competent.

I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is.

How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.

Mozilla might have been the doctor at one point but now they’ve morphed into the politician. The Google gravy train has utterly destroyed Mozilla’s ability to innovate. The whole culture over there has become completely corrupt and self-indulgent and the good ones have either left or been let go. Sad days.

Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Good point :-)

But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around:

Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

It is as correct to say that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. The difference between these claims and Hanlon's Razor is that the razor warns against assuming the malice in the absence of evidence.

It’s plausible deniability

Google buzz and Google wave are also casualties.

Did anyone miss wave? I found it to be a solution looking for a problem, which it eventually found in gsuite which is successful.

I actually think Wave was a bit before it's time and couldn't really find a place to settle. It kind of reminds me of the laser. At first, it was a fun playtoy but no one had any real uses for it. Over time, it became more and more important until now it's ingrained in almost everything we do.

Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.

It was weird, Wave's main reason for existing is for businesses with massive email chains of 100 versions of a document, but they killed it about a month after enabling it for business accounts

Like a hyperactive toddler that wants all the toys his friends have.