Comment Re:1) all week 2) the seafood platter (Score 3, Interesting) 359
I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.
Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.
Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.