<story><title>Google Reader Founder: I Never Would Have Founded Reader Inside Today&apos;s Google</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkantrowitz/2013/07/01/google-reader-founder-i-never-would-have-founded-reader-inside-todays-google/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cocoflunchy</author><text>I feel like the only reason we hear so much about Google Reader is because the main users were either journalists or bloggers, which creates an extremely disproportionate noise &amp;#x2F; (former) user ratio.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Reader Founder: I Never Would Have Founded Reader Inside Today&apos;s Google</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkantrowitz/2013/07/01/google-reader-founder-i-never-would-have-founded-reader-inside-todays-google/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mehrdada</author><text>&amp;quot;Google Reader founder Chris Wetherell said that if the idea came to him in today’s Google, he would leave the company and build it on his own rather than put it at the mercy of Google leadership.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Guess what dude?! If I were in that position and I were primarily worried about my project &amp;quot;being at the mercy of Google&amp;quot; (or any company that I don&amp;#x27;t have sufficient control over, for that matter), I would have left _anytime_. It should not be something you realize _today_. This is just whining over a &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; (presumably; assuming you would have pulled it off well) tradeoff you, yourself, made back in the day. It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;today&amp;#x27;s Google vs. back then&amp;#x27;s Google&amp;quot;. This is the tradeoff that you make anytime you decide to work for someone else; this is obvious and was obvious back in the day. If you had not seen it, the blame is wholly on you.&lt;p&gt;Google Reader would not have been a guaranteed success that it was without Google&amp;#x27;s resources. If one does not have the balls to take the risk of working at his or her own startup, he or she is not entitled to the benefits either. In hindsight, it&amp;#x27;s too easy to say &amp;quot;I would have gone and pulled it off independently&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I personally think Larry overall has been focusing on what matters and under his awesome leadership, Google is performing far better than Eric&amp;#x27;s time and this whole situation is not dissimilar to what happened at WWDC1997 and Steve&amp;#x27;s response to the random questioner in the audience:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...the hardest thing is how does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision that&amp;#x27;s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars... 10 billion dollars... a product a year.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>