From Forbes:
When Google announced Wednesday night that it was shutting down its Reader product, it was met with a reaction that wasn’t just furious, but personal. Many angered Reader-ites took to Twitter, looking for some outlet to express their anger, with some shouting “Save Our Reader!” in the hopes Google would hear their cries and keep their product alive.
Within the root of that protest, however, lies the very problem. Google Reader was never anyone’s Reader but Google’s and, by virtue of ownership, Google was always free to do with it what it wanted. On Wednesday night, the company announced plans that made that fact painfully clear and, being that Google evidently weighed the decision beforehand, it is unlikely that any protest, no matter how long it trends on Twitter, will get Google to change its mind. Google Reader, for all intents and purposes, is dead.
The death of Google Reader reveals a problem of the modern Internet that many of us likely have in the back of our heads but are afraid to let surface: We are all participants in a user driven Internet, but we are still just the users, nothing more. No matter how much work we put in to optimize our online presences, our tools and our experiences, we are still at the mercy of big companies controlling the platforms we operate on. When they don’t like what’s happening, even if we do, they can make whatever call they want. And Wednesday night, Google made theirs.
Comments
4 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.I prefer this take : “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles. ” – Dave Winer
Don’t be a user, be a customer. You are not Google’s customer, advertisers are.
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And for the same reason: No cloud for me, except from my own server.
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Weird to see Forbes of all places making the case for open source software, whether they realize it or not.
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As a software developer, I think quite a bit about piracy. One “solution” to piracy is for a company to run its software on their servers, out of the hands of pirates – which is what Google Reader does. The downside is that the company can shutdown the software whenever they like and whenever it becomes unprofitable. At least with “released” software, users can continue to use it (even if it is vulnerable to piracy). I suppose that’s the dilemma. Pirates push companies away from releasing software and towards server-based software, a strategy that can come to bite the users in the end. As Dave Wiener said: pay for your software (rather than pirate) and everyone will be better off in the end.
BTW, I don’t think Forbes is so much making an argument for open-source so much as an argument against server-based software. (Your closed-source software would continue to function even if a company decided to stop supporting it.)
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