<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>scarface74</author><text>&amp;gt; Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it),&lt;p&gt;It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage.  No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.</text></item><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This always seemed like one of Google&amp;#x27;s worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that&amp;#x27;s saying something. It was a plain unforced error.&lt;p&gt;Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would&amp;#x27;ve been a no-brainer.&lt;p&gt;But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn&amp;#x27;t have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would&amp;#x27;ve benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would&amp;#x27;ve meshed well with it. That little Google &amp;quot;stuff you maybe want to see&amp;quot; panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like &amp;quot;hey, we think you like this site, there&amp;#x27;s a new article,&amp;quot; and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately I have to assume that it&amp;#x27;s a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader&amp;#x27;s audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn&amp;#x27;t lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raizer88</author><text>I never understood why Google doesn&amp;#x27;t hire B teams to do the maintenance work, or outsource it. It&amp;#x27;s normal that if you hire only top players that no one wants to be stuck doing tickets.</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>scarface74</author><text>&amp;gt; Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it),&lt;p&gt;It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage.  No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.</text></item><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This always seemed like one of Google&amp;#x27;s worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that&amp;#x27;s saying something. It was a plain unforced error.&lt;p&gt;Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sorts of influencers. If they had viewed Reader as a marketing expense, keeping it online would&amp;#x27;ve been a no-brainer.&lt;p&gt;But instead, they instead viewed it as a consumer tool that didn&amp;#x27;t have a path to profitability, and they were 100% right, but then over the next few years, it became clear how many later Google efforts would&amp;#x27;ve benefited from Reader existing. Google+ would&amp;#x27;ve meshed well with it. That little Google &amp;quot;stuff you maybe want to see&amp;quot; panel on Android phones that would frequently make little notices like &amp;quot;hey, we think you like this site, there&amp;#x27;s a new article,&amp;quot; and that was probably really involved to build, and also it absolutely sucked compared to just having Reader.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately I have to assume that it&amp;#x27;s a business org problem. No engineer was going to get a promotion keeping Reader alive. No manager was going to be able to grow Reader&amp;#x27;s audience 10x. No director would want to give up a half dozen of their engineers to keep Reader running just because it would significantly hurt Google to turn it off. And no executive cared about a product that small. The org structure didn&amp;#x27;t lead to someone incentivized to want to keep Reader going, despite its popularity inside and outside the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>Ok, that&amp;#x27;s great, because those are the people most likely to break a good thing. Maybe we can instead hire at least a few people (and given that Google uses shared database storage, build engineering, deployment, etc. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine we need many such people) who care more about things like a predictable schedule working on a low-stress product so they can have good work&amp;#x2F;life balance, to essentially just keep working software working correctly?</text></comment>