<story><title>Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today</title><url>https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem terribly rational, really; it wasn&amp;#x27;t the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from &amp;quot;provider of great free stuff&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes kills stuff&amp;quot; is the moment it became unreliable, the moment I had to stop and consider whether their interests really aligned with mine rather than just assuming so. Or maybe I&amp;#x27;m just bitter over nothing:)&lt;p&gt;Edit: Perhaps a better phrasing: Before, if you asked &amp;quot;will this useful Google product be here in a year&amp;quot;, I would answer &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. After, I could only say &amp;quot;maybe&amp;quot;. And that made all the difference.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhaway84773</author><text>It was the reason they killed it for me.&lt;p&gt;Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits.&lt;p&gt;It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today</title><url>https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem terribly rational, really; it wasn&amp;#x27;t the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from &amp;quot;provider of great free stuff&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes kills stuff&amp;quot; is the moment it became unreliable, the moment I had to stop and consider whether their interests really aligned with mine rather than just assuming so. Or maybe I&amp;#x27;m just bitter over nothing:)&lt;p&gt;Edit: Perhaps a better phrasing: Before, if you asked &amp;quot;will this useful Google product be here in a year&amp;quot;, I would answer &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. After, I could only say &amp;quot;maybe&amp;quot;. And that made all the difference.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>plorkyeran</author><text>I think it was the first thing they&amp;#x27;d killed which had been around for quite a while, still had devoted users, and Google didn&amp;#x27;t offer a replacement. If you look at the graveyard, the pre-Reader things they killed were things which had flopped (e.g. Buzz), things which were no longer relevant (e.g Gears), acquisitions, and mergers where they had two redundant products (e.g. Google Video).</text></comment>