Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would have no idea what the product was even for.
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.
Reader wasn't the breaking point for my company, but there's a clear trend in Google products
- They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
- They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your company that did the original implementation to have mostly moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge loss right before a major product shift)
- They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell, even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
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I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do not use Google for anything in production (with the exception of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure added some weight.
Same. I'll never put GCM on my backend options list when building products after Reader. I can't operate with that level of EOL risk exposure. Will be migrating off Gmail now too with so much risk of account cancellation in the Android Dev community but that's going to be a longer project.
Such thought processes has already saved me from wasting my time on AMP.
But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't forgotten.
I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent loss of trust and sales.