All right, so I have a slight bone to pick with Marco. This is actually a fairly well-written article and I'm glad that people are engaging with it elsewhere in the comments, but I'm just a bit confused that he's choosing to write it now, and about Google Reader than about, say, Reading List. Remember? That product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Instapaper? Or iCloud, that product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Dropbox? Or Ping, that product that Apple released for free and then shitcanned after not enough people used it?
Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be good for my product" [1].
So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are numbered.
It sounds to me like you are imputing motives unsupported by this particular example.
First, Marco pretty explicitly said he wasn't in favor of regulation:
Much of our rapid progress wouldn’t have happened if we had to play by the rest of the world’s rules, and I think we’re better off overall the way it is.
In general, it's pretty even-handed on this particular issue:
The best thing we can do isn’t necessarily to try to pay for everything, which is unrealistic and often not an option. Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures.
Second, it sounds complex because it _is_ complex. He's pretty explicitly addressing the "you're not the customer" canard, as if that's a panacea. In reality it is a trade-off, and paid vs. free is possibly even orthogonal, given the last paragraph.
I'm not sure how an open monoculture is square one. If it becomes less than ideal to anyone, they can just fork it. Plus, you can't really shut down an open "One True Product" if someone can just use the open materials to start it up again.
The risk seems to be more in the camp of the company. If it's open, someone could undercut them more easily than if it was closed. So the onus is placed more on the ability of the company to continually add value through services or the kind of innovation that led to the product in the first place, rather than just protecting their IP.
This is more of a consequentialist argument, but Reading List didn't have the same ripple effects as Reader did.
I think that, to be fair to Google, they could not have predicted the popularity of Reader, and the resultant growth in responsibility along with it.
Hands up, who would give a shit if Reading List got axed tomorrow?
There is a cognitive dissonance, as you bring up, because Reader is in a sense a service the same way Reading List is.
Apple made Reading List, because such services were popular to the extent that Apple wanted to give people a native solution. That's hardly much different from what Google did, except we impute a less noble incentive on their part - user adoption, ad impressions. Or perhaps it's that we are left to impute their incentive to dicontinue it - G+ redirection.
I agree with you in that I have a hunch Marco may be an Apple fanboi; still, as you said, it's a well written article, and one point in particular stands out to me: the fact that people are trying to kill RSS and leave the only options as proprietary-sell-your-personal-information ghettos that could be shut down at a moments notice, and much more effectively.
The Internet wasn't built on AOL or IE, and it shouldn't be forced to ad hoc proprietary standards, especially if you have to give up privacy to communicate with people. I'm eternally grateful that Facebook and Google+ haven't supplanted email in my social circles and I can still run my own web and email server.
I see no difference between Google Reader shutting down and Apple abandoning the Mac Pro.
This has nothing to do with free: it has to do with a failed product like any other, plain and simple. People don't see Google Reader as a failed product because they like it and "a lot of people use it". But that "a lot" is in absolute terms, not relative ones. The reality is that not enough people use RSS for it to matter at Google scale. Even if everyone currently using it were to start paying for it tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket of Google profits. Reader had it's chance, and it failed to get enough traction, period. The "free" part is just a distraction in this conversation, Reader makes no sense as a product for Google at any (reasonable) price. This story would have gone down exactly the same had Google offered reader at a price that matched the other competitors at the time: they probably still would have won, and still would have ended up shutting it down.
This is exactly the same as how having the Mac Pro line would be incredibly lucrative for you or me, but it just doesn't matter for Apple. The margins are through the roof on that thing, and in a lot of ways its quite possibly the perfect product: a 3 year old machine that commands the same price it did 3 years ago. But again, not enough people want it for it to matter at Apple scale. If Apple could double the price and maintain the same sale numbers of the Mac Pro, it still wouldn't be worth it for them.
If anything, we should see this as a really healthy market correction. Its good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers and profits are meaningful.
This analogy would only work if Apple gave away the Mac Pro for free, everyone switched to it because it was free, and then Apple announced they needed all the Mac Pros back because they were done providing free Mac Pros.
But it's not. If you have a Mac Pro now, you can continue to use it as long as you want. Google Reader disappears in July.
My analogy was comparing the products themselves, not the surrounding techniques used by the companies that make them. My point is that Reader and Mac Pro are at their core very similar products: immensely useful for a small (nerdy) market niche, not capable of ever providing enough profits to warrant their upkeep in a corporation the size of Apple or Google.
Whether you believe Google "won" by offering it for free or not is inconsequential in my mind. My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it, because the product simply doesn't make sense to them in the same way the Mac Pro really just doesn't make sense to Apple.
But Marco's point was that Reader dominated its niche in such a way that few alternatives exist. This is obviously not true of the Mac Pro. Google didn't simply kill off an unsuccessful product. They killed off an unsuccessful product that had a near-monopoly.
1. It dominated its niche because it was a legitimately good product, not just because it was free. There have been many free alternatives for a long time, even before Reader. For example if every Mac user actually used the built in RSS readers that ship with OS X they would have eclipsed the Reader userbase.
2. The fact that it is a small niche (and more importantly isn't really growing) probably better explains the "lack" of alternatives.
The fact of the matter is that when Apple finally kills off the Mac Pro there actually won't be (lega) alternatives, unlike the current situation with RSS where there are plenty of alternatives (its just that Google's was way better). This is my whole point: Google won on quality, decided it wasn't worth it for them, and then exited. Had they priced it from the beginning (either through ads or freemium or whatever), they would have still won in my opinion, and then still killed it. Reader winning and going away has nothing to do with free in my mind: there is just no universe where Google would continue supporting an RSS product because RSS is not a big enough market.
I guess my point is that Google would have "killed the space" no matter what, not because they made it free.
Feedly got 500k users just a few days after Google announced Reader was going to be shutdown. That's 500k people who have a pulse on this type of thing. The actual RSS user total must be much higher, I guess we'll see how much higher when Reader actually shuts down. But whatever the number is, it's pretty clear that there are enough RSS users that a real business can be built on top of it, and indeed there were business built on top of it before Reader and I'm betting there will be real businesses built on top of it after Reader, but I find it really hard to look at what we know and not conclude that Reader had a profound impact in this space.
> The fact of the matter is that when Apple finally kills off the Mac Pro there actually won't be (lega) alternatives,
I don't know what you are talking about, the Mac Pro is a tower computer, there are many alternatives today and there will be many alternatives when the Mac Pro goes away, Apple doesn't dominate the tower computer market.
I don't think we disagree here. I explained that a "big market" is a relative term. To Google, the market is not large enough to justify keeping this thing around, especially in this context of "social networks" that people keep bringing up. The bigger the company, the harder it is to be considered "successful". This in no way means that it isn't a viable business for a smaller company. In fact, that's basically exactly what I said in my last sentence:
> Its good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers and profits are meaningful.
Google forgot who the "small" number of users were. Reader is/was a power tool for many users. I was one that wouldn't mind paying some money for the time that Reader saved me. But now I have to consider that Google can kill any of the tools that I use for any reason. There are alternate choices in all Google "strengths". And many of us will switch to them.
Sure it is. If I want a desktop that runs OS X, what do I do? I buy one. Sure, it's a monopoly, but it's a product with a unique characteristic that people are willing to pay money for. Unfortunately, if Apple decides to drop the Mac Pro, it'll be a market that still exists but no one will be able to legally enter.
But the Mac Pros people are using now don't cease to exist if/when Apple officially cans them. That makes them very disimilar products. You would have been better off comparing to Apple iWeb Hosting.
> My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it
What about the universe where someone decides that keeping the goodwill of the (yes small, but as we've seen in the past week very vocal) Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode?
> Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode
What makes you think it is a minuscule cost? Crawling the millions of feeds and updating the XML parsers as feed formats change is going to cost very real dollars.
A better solution would have been for Google to auction off the service. This would have allowed smaller companies to run it and impose a small fee. While it might not have made sense financially for Google to do this, it might make sense for a small company with a small staff focusing just on this product to make a go of it.
I think much of the confused back-and-forth in this thread seems to stem from the fact that "good business decision" and "bad outcome for users" are not mutually exclusive. I don't think Marco doubts that Google had valid reasons for shuttering Reader. His piece is simply a plea to avoid becoming dependent on "proprietary monocultures" so that when these shutdowns occur, the negative impact on the user-base is minimized.
(Though I'm not sure that he's entirely against regulation, as some in this thread have suggested.)
The interesting thing to me is that Google is throwing away a human-powered recommendation engine; Google Reader was people putting together their own equivalent of something like dmoz.org, volunteering analytics on prioritization.
Perhaps the organizing being done was too tech-focused to be of enough value in any other category, or Google is confident enough in algorithms to drop the parallel system. Or, as was stated, their wasn't enough participation at all.
I think that analogy is a bit of a stretch. The Mac Pro is a product that you purchase. Google Reader was a free service that was dependent on someone else.
If Apple decides to kill the Mac Pro line, the Mac Pros that have been sold don't suddenly cease to function. But on July 1, Reader will no longer work neither on the website nor on any of the apps using the API.
I think you can compare the Mac Pro to Sparrow (which Marco mentioned in a footnote). It's not even enough for a product to be profitable. If a product's development team can be redeployed to some even more profitable (or "strategic") use, you may be saying goodbye to a perfectly good product.
I guess a big thing that I have to wonder here is how many folks stopped using Reader (or became less engaged) after they swapped many of the built in sharing features out for G+ integration...
Many of the people in my social circle that were big Google Reader users stopped using it because it was much more difficult to share articles that we'd browse while at work.
What does this have to do with anything? Google is a business like any other. Google is not dropping Reader because they are secretly closed and nefarious, they are dropping it because no one uses it (again, relatively speaking). If people actually used RSS then they'd feel compelled to keep it, whether priced or not, because it would be make business sense to keep it around. I guarantee you that if RSS had Facebook's user count, they'd be banging that RSS drum like crazy.
But it doesn't, and Google is not a charity. Whether you believe them to be "open" or not (meaningless statement), being "open" certainly does not commit you to supporting arbitrary protocols indefinitely for the good of the world, especially ones that most people don't use. RSS had its shot, it just can't compete in today's web.
And we'll see for just how long you can still buy the Mac Pro.
Where is google+ mentioned in my argument? Its not. However, for sake of argument, if g+ proves to not get enough users eventually either, I'm sure they'll shut it down too and try something new. Just like they did with wave.
It isn't in your argument, but is the elephant in the room. If low usage was really the cause for GReader sunset, G+ should have been chopped too. It wasn't, hence it isn't.
Anecdotally, most folks I know use Reader every day at both home and office, but "use" G+ only to the extent that it's plugged into other Google services.
Anecdote: I post links to my blog entries to G+ in case Google gives it undue weight in search ranking. A few people click +1, and it's in the search results of the few thousand people who have my G+ account in a circle.
But that's it. Anyone I find interesting enough to follow ends up in Feedly.
Look I like Google and I understand they have to run a business but I have a hard time believing that shuttering Reader has nothing to do with driving people to G+.
I guess you are not understanding my position. I neither like nor don't like Google, and I'm not "defending" their position from an altruistic standpoint. Maybe their plan is to help G+ through shutting down Reader, I don't know. My point is that if they did that, it wouldn't be a testament for or against their openness, because Reader merited being shut down either way, for the simple fact that it is a failed technology.
If you strongly want "open" to beat "closed social", then maybe RSS dying might be a step in a positive direction, since its had its shot, and proved to just not be useful for people. Now, I personally feel RSS neither hurts nor helps "closed social" in any way, so I think its inconsequential.
I am not following the logic you believe Google would use to think shuttering Reader would push people to Google+. How does pissing off people who use Reader push them to use another service by the company that just pissed them off? Especially when Google+ doesn't really do what the Reader did?
Nothing into that link says anything about shutting down Reader to drive people to Google+.
It does have a former employee saying Google+ is more of a focus for Google than Reader, but that isn't remotely the same and everyone knew that for quite a while.
After all, before Google Reader’s sharing features were converted to corresponding Google+ ones, users of the soon-to-be-killed service used to share like crazy. Shih postulates, with plenty of logic, that this activity dropped as Google pushed Reader users to sharing on Google+ instead.
That is in reference to the changing from internal sharing to Google+ sharing in October 2011, not shutting down Google Reader. I understand that Google prefers their users to use Google+ over Reader, but I still don't see how shutting down Reader = more Google+ users, even from Google's perspective. If anything, they are removing a service that could have driven Google+ sharing.
Not exactly. Apple stops shipping OSX updates for older Mac Pros, so eventually, you lose software support. I have a Mac Pro that no longer works with Mountain Lion. Is it missing some kind of hardware needed to run Mountain Lion? No. Is there any reason it shouldn't be able to run it? No.
As a result, I could not get upgrades for some software that required Mountain Lion to use. That, combined with the lack of upgrades, forced me to replace my Mac Pro with a custom built Linux box. It now sits idle in the corner.
Okay, so it's not black and white. Sure, my android phone from 3 years ago can't run most newer apps. But it can still run the things I had on the phone at the time. I guess what I was getting at was that Apple (or Google) doesn't come and take the device away from you once the product line has been EOL'd.
It's "open" in the sense of it was built on open protocols, rather than proprietary ones. Replacing those open protocols with proprietary ones makes you less open.
Google moving from Reader (RSS/Atom) to Current (unspecified protocols) is less open.
Google moving Calendar from CalDAV to their proprietary Calendar API is less open.
Google potentially moving Talk from XMPP to an unspecified proprietary protocol is less open.
I presume the underpinnings of Reader (search, caching, etc.) are so tied to Google tech that open sourcing it would either be impossible or lead to a neutered version that was useless.
I agree with the article in many respects, but I find there's a giant blind spot that needs addressing given the author.
I don't understand how Marco can't view Apple as a proprietary monoculture, and one that is somewhat worse in the sense that you can't clone the features of it without being sued (what if Reader had patents covering it and sued if you tried to create a clone?)
Apple frequently force upgrades users and develoeprs, some would say by planned obsolescence. For example, early on in IOS, people built apps that allowed in-app purchases and subscriptions, because Apple had no API for them, so we had a federated, open system for that feature. Then Apple changed their T&C and mandate use of Apple infrastructure to do this, and people now have to resort to hacks (remember Dropbox getting banned because of a link to sign up?) Slowly, the apps were forced onto Apple monoculture services.
Basically, when Apple introduces monoculture, it is viewed as a good. It simplifies user experience, etc. But for everyone else, it's somehow bad and evil.
I'd argue that a lot of us in the "Apple fan community," including Marco, understand that there are negatives to Apple's approach to, well, nearly everything. It's apparently very easy for people to pick up on the approval we give Apple while glossing over the criticism, I suspect in part because we don't tend to see iOS's locked-down nature as the existential crisis that, well, Hacker News readers tend to sometimes see -- and because we don't see a problem with something that they see as a deal-breaker, then, well, we must never say anything bad about Apple. In fact, we often do.
Having said that, there's at least a practical difference in the kind of "monoculture" that the iOS App Store represents and the kind of monoculture that Google Reader represented: while Apple may change the terms, it's highly unlikely they'd ever make the App Store just go away. I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS rather than for a violation that they should have been aware of when they submitted it. There are some high-profile cases of stupid rejections, to be sure, but that's not the same thing.
And, it's at least worth noting that a major difference there is that Apple derives revenue from their services. Say what you will about them, but that's a pretty good incentive to not just take their ball and go home. Google Reader didn't bring in any revenue, and that's what ultimately doomed it. (as in beer) does work, but not indefinitely.
> I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS
Well, at the very least, the removal gun has been pointed at a lot of commercial apps when Apple has decided to "re-interpret" the TOS.
For instance, it used to be standard practice to kick someone out to your website to buy an ebook (i.e. the appropriate alternative to IAP). Over the course of several months, it became a TOS violation.
Apps that required an external subscription used to include sign-up links on their login screen. Now they don't.
How many commercial apps were hit by the Apple's app store programming language restriction?
Or, if we're including the Mac App Store, how many apps and developers have left it over sandboxing?
Yes, Apple isn't likely to shut down their app store completely. But, whenever they want, they can (and might sometimes do) kill a part of it that you care about, for their own internal reasons.
Google ran Reader for 8 years. Incidently, I bought a Mac Pro which Apple dropped support for any hardware older than late 2008. I could not get Mountain Lion for my Mac Pro, even thought there was no real reason why it could not run it from a performance stand point. As a result, I switched my main desktop from a Mac Pro to a Ubuntu Linux. Neither Microsoft nor Linux aggressively drop old hardware off the face of the earth like this.
Apple, with its $100 billion in cash couldn't afford a few resources to continue supporting perfectly working hardware? They essentially deprecated my $4000 computer, because some of the commercial software I used only shipped newer updates on Mountain Lion. (and before you trot out the 64-bit EFI/Graphics Driver excuse, keep in mind both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux can be installed on this old machine and take full advantage of it, including up-to-date drivers. Apple makes many times more profit than Microsoft, and yet can't fund appropriate support for their full line of HW)
Point being, I was a paying customer, and I still got ditched. Apparently, it is not enough to merely derive revenue, it has to be large amounts of revenue. Hence, Apple stiffs the "Pro" market. Google could have made money from Reader, but the reality was, too few people were using it even though it was free. Lesson: if you are a niche community, you can get screwed, Apple, Google, it doesn't matter.
And by the way, many apps were kicked out of the app store for having links in them which lead to a page where you could purchase something through the web browser.
Apple wants a cut of the money you make. That's it. Dropbox could have a sign up link if they agreed to pay the 30% fee. I do think it's a bit shortsighted, but they don't block open protocols or monopolize services.
They don't? Apple early on blocked alternative Mail clients and Google Voice or other apps which "duplicate" functionality builtin apps provide. They relaxed those rules now, but under the original rules, Google Maps would have been banned.
The article accuses Google of "predatory pricing" and my story is meant to illustrate that any price can be seen as monopolist, collusive, or predatory, and that laws against such things are misguided and reactionary.
I might be paraphrasing the story wrong. It's a folk story amongst economists about the absurdity of antitrust regulation. I'm not sure who originated it.
Some solid points here, but I gotta disagree with this one...
If a product grows huge quickly, which almost always requires it to be free, it will probably be acquired for a lot of money. Free products that don’t grow quickly enough can usually die with an “acquihire”, which lets everyone save face and ensures that the investors get something out of the deal.
I think this way of thinking is the product of a very frothy market over the last few years. Now, I'm not one to scream series A crunch from the mountain tops, but it's unrealistic to think that thousands of these startups that "don't grow quickly enough" will be acquihired. In 2012 Google and Facebook combined to make 21 acquisitions. That doesn't put much of a dent in the number of failing startups. And with the Formspring shutdown announcement last week, it seems that even companies that have achieved impressive scale (30M users in since 2010) cannot rely on being bought.
I don't know enough about how things went to agree or disagree. I'm still amazed at how many "aqui-hires" there are in the industry. How many companies that have made it to a solid Series A round have fallen flat on their face?
Formspring seems like a red herring to me; everything I heard about it in the real world (as a high-school teacher) was toxic. Of all the online bullying issues I had to deal with, more involved Formspring than even Facebook. The anonymous thing was a double-edged sword.
The analogy to predatory pricing doesn't work because in the brick and mortar world, you drive out your competitors so that you may raise your prices. So the price is said to be artificially lowered.
In the software world, free software products stay free even after they have become the dominant platform. The price is not artificially lowered to zero; at scale the cost of operating a free service is lower than the advertising revenue generated by it. This is actually the "natural" price for the product.
Rarely if ever do I find myself in agreement with Marco, but he articulates a valid point quite well. Monopolies and effective monopolies are obviously quite detrimental to the web, especially when they fail.
But, there is little that can be done about the tendency for monopolies to emerge within the web ecosystem, only to fail. If companies were to charge or advertise heavily from day one, it would effectively preclude any sort of viral, meteoric rise, because the overwhelming number of prospective users would turn their nose up at it. Most companies would never achieve widespread success. On the other hand, a lack of an organized business strategy leaves companies scrambling to devise revenue sources, as is happening with Facebook and their absurd gift card thing. Either one can try to make money and be relegated to obscurity, or one can become popular and end up exasperated at their inability to make money. There is very little opportunity to become both wildly successful and fiscally viable; that is why most companies fail.
As a user, I would prefer a lack of business model to a lack of a business: better to have an RSS reader (or social network, or mail client/to-do app) that lacks substancial income for 8 years than one with a direct business model that never gets off the ground.
And this is really where I have an issue with people posing the proprietary nature of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, et al as "A Problem".
People throw their content into these services, time and again. Often doing so as they're suffering whatever pain we hypothesize is implicit in leaving a prior service. (However much pain it did or did not cause, to have everyone's stuff locked up in a MySpace silo, it did not stop anyone from putting all their stuff right back into Facebook's silo.)
And they do this in other contexts: no-one much frets about proprietary saved-game file formats. Or the release of new console platforms that end support for entire libraries of games. So clearly there's a line.
And it seems a reasonable one to draw. Because who really cares about their old saved games, or a game they hadn't played, or mobile app they hadn't so much as launched, in months?
It's certainly nice as things approach the open/internet ideal. But there's clearly an entire class of computing where people do cost/benefit considerations with an emphasis on immediate entertainment value, rather than long-term computing value.
And people have repeatedly demonstrated a desire to treat social networks more like consoles than even mobile platforms, let alone PC computing platforms.
So why do geeks persist in seeing "A Problem" here? Let alone a problem that, if solved, would garner any attention for having presented a solution?
Not sure why there isn't more of a discussion going on, given the uproar over Reader, I found the whole article insightful but especially the end. The concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense.
The concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense.
Yup. This guy did a fantastic job articulating what many others have just given up on trying to. Those of us who voice trepidation are usually marginalized as jealous and/or haters. See: http://xkcd.com/743/
OP is trying to make it seem like offering web services for free is rule-breaking or even borderline illegal. This is not so. It is not predatory pricing to price something at its marginal cost (which for web services is near-zero).
The OP also seems to be unaware of TV, radio, etc.
It's predatory to price something below the level that's possible for a viable independent business. It's bad for customers in tech for exactly the same reasons as in any other industry.
/used to work for a business that had to compete with twilio.
That's a definition that suits your view but is not commonly shared. The item typically needs to be sold below cost and there needs to be intent to drive out competitors. Neither is true here.
? if you give something away that a loss because it actually costs money to produce/provide, like Google did with the Reader service - it doesn't fit the definition?
what a crazy piece of logic.
google destroyed the market for smaller RSS-app vendors by providing a service for free, at a loss. was it on purpose? or just stupidity? what exactly does it change? the ecosystem around RSS has been ruined, maybe beyond repair.
> google destroyed the market for smaller RSS-app vendors by providing a service for free, at a loss. was it on purpose? or just stupidity? what exactly does it change? the ecosystem around RSS has been ruined, maybe beyond repair.
This is surely a joke, because the last time I checked software of my choosing can pluck RSS feeds and serve me content, whether it be a web, desktop, or mobile app. While the current quality of RSS apps can be argued, RSS is in no way near dead.
are you new to HN ? the last few days listed 10+ alternatives. Google allowed you to export your feeds that could be imported to any one of the alternatives offered. So whats the issue ?
The marginal cost to deliver a web service like Google Reader is near zero (which actually begs for it to be priced near zero). Every feed reader I have ever used has been free. The vast majority of Google's services are free.
Not all software requires revenue to exist and function, this kind of thinking implies that software that does not generate a revenue is somehow competing unfairly with software that seeks to generate a revenue. More simply, nobody is guaranteed the opportunity to generate revenue and the exit of Google Reader only enhances the chance for someone to make money on RSS software. If it turns out people don't want to pay for RSS and consider RSS to only have value as a free service, then that is fine and use of hobby or open source RSS projects will become the norm.
I think this argument is disorganized. It reads as if he's arguing for free in favor of paid (which I don't really agree with), but I think he's actually arguing for open in favor of closed (which I do agree with).
The predatory pricing thing is a problem for a lot of people. I've most recently come across it with a friend trying to start his graphic-design business who was upset about discovering that "99 designs" website. Before that it was a bass player for our band that was strenuously principled that we should never accept a gig "for exposure", and should also not play with musicians that had a history of accepting free gigs, since it was "disrespectful" to the players that were trying to make a living at it. While I do agree that there are moderating counterpoints to both, they do bring up relevant concerns.
Meanwhile, you have Radiohead and Nine-Inch-Nails, both of whom experimented with releasing their music for free way back when. When it "worked", everyone championed how it was the way forward for the music industry - how music was a "service", how the recordings should be loss-leader marketing expenses for the paid service of live performances. Overlooking the people who were more focused on the recording side of things, and the fact that those two bands had built-in fanbases. Years later, both bands are moving on from the "free" model, while so many people are misguidedly releasing their tracks for free that indie songwriters are paying money to even get their signed-up fans to listen to their new tracks.
I'm not so sure that the conclusion is that free works, as it is accepting that free works by being predatory and that there can be consequences that hurt others. And it isn't exactly ethical to accept a negative consequence on behalf of someone else. This is not to say that going free is wrong - sometimes there is a bigger picture that might make it worthwhile for all (for instance, many open source techs that have created new marketplaces that have enabled many people to make a living). But the argument does not reduce down to something as simple as free works, therefore free is good.
> "I think this argument is disorganized. It reads as if he's arguing for free in favor of paid (which I don't really agree with), but I think he's actually arguing for open in favor of closed (which I do agree with)."
That was my thought. He opened by talking about Free, because Reader closing and Mailbox being acquired stirred up a lot of the usual anti-Free-Service backlash. And he discusses free, I think, just to underline that it does work.
But I think he went into the weeds (and clearly lost much of the readership there) in discussing why. Which is strange, as I don't think even the anti-Free crowd takes issue with whether Free works and they certainly seem to all understand that it does work.
And, ultimately, the "why" part is irrelevant to where he winds up, which is simply that open protocols should be preferred to proprietary ones.
I don't usually upvote Marco.org articles but this one was very good. Before Reader there was a vibrant (niche, but vibrant) market for RSS readers. Reader decimated that market and arguably killed innovation in RSS altogether. I remember when PubSubHubBub and RSS Cloud came out and wondered why anyone would bother implementing them for feeds when all that mattered was if Google Reader was fetching your stuff fast enough (it was).
It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally: https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss). It might turn out that Reader shutting down is the best thing that could have happened.
"Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures."
Said the man who makes a magazine that only works on iPads and loves developing for a platform controlled by one single company in California that is prone to suppressing political content or apps that might compete with its own. Nice.
And, after WebDav and RSS, IMAP support for Gmail will become "insufficient to support great new features" so it will be decommissioned in favor of a great new API. Just wait...
Free works, but for whom? Certainly a lot of companies are doing well by giving away everything, but how long will the acquihire exit strategy remain open? Furthermore, the user is getting absolutely screwed. There have been a lot of notable services that have popped up over the last few years and then some big company came in to pick up the talent and dumped the product and subsequently its users.
I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google. Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS. Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for it's millions of users.
It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.
My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm okay with investing time in adopting a free service.
However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves (probably a minority), they could do so with ease.
Lower costs in this market are also something that makes open source possible, I just found two opensource projects inspired by Google Reader and hosted on Google Code, what do you think of them?
Apps like Feedly and NewsBlur were managing to survive before the Google Reader announcement. If you build something good, and market it well, with niche like features - enough people will be happy to pay for it to keep you and the product going.
I think author fails to recognize paid services that eventually fail because of the barrier is never able to become a sustainable business. Wouldn't it be worse by paying for something then losing it ? There are plenty of free offerings that are able to become sustainable businesses through various business models. I think the distinction is rather the choices of the founder + acceleration of growth vs paid / free model.
edit:
Every business that deals with some sort of digital goods today has to compete with free.. music, movies, games, etc. So maybe we should all just sit around and say how unfair it is rather than to figure out how to compete. Its a completely ridiculous argument
Everything can work, and everything has its advantages and flaws. You just need to know where you're, and have a strategy to succeed based on your business model.
Writing software is not cheap, or even close to free. Even if you can host it for a low price, there are still other associated costs that people ever talk about. Mostly the time spent trying to win the freemium lottery (and getting acquihired).
the one thing that i haven't seen mentioned, in all this chatter about how "RSS is dead" -
RSS feeds are free in both beer and speech, and were likely authored (or co-authored) by Aaron Swartz to be that way. The Google Pluses of the world, not so much...
Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be good for my product" [1].
So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are numbered.
[1] http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper