Google likes to make their products stupidly simple so they can reach the widest, most stupid audience possible. When Google doesn’t make products stupidly simple, they fail. Take Google Plus, Buzz, and Wave.
Google succeeds when they make their products simple, like their search engine, Google Talk, Google Docs (simple in comparison to Word), Gmail (when it first started).
Simplicity is good. Clearness is good. We’ve loved Google for that.
But now Google has taken it onto another level. They’ve taken their clear simplicity and made it into stupid simplicity.
I’m convinced that Google does not want to reach smart people. Google wants to reach the widest audience possible in the tens and hundreds of millions. 700,000 _smart_ users is not enough. Google doesn’t care about reaching smart people. It’s clear. They have 700,000 extremely devoted Google Reader users who know how to use the internet in a smart way. But Google still eliminates Google Reader.
With 700,000 intelligent users, Google could have developed a revenue stream off the product. A freakin monkey could make money off 700,000 users who are dedicated to using a product multiple times a day.
Every single person I know that has expressed how they will miss Google Reader is someone who is internet savvy and smart. People like:
- General Manager of Tribune Media Services, JamesPinnick
- Voce Communications Supervisor, ChrisThilk
- Chicago Tribune photojournalist, AGarciaPhoto
- Kidology Web Producer, Tannerman
- Tribune UX Researcher, Alforque
- Product manager for TMS Entertainment, Fioritto
- Director of Student Media at Saint Xavier University, Pkreten
Google doesn’t want to reach these types of people anymore. Thus, they kill the product. If Google cared about reaching smart people, they would keep Google Reader.
Since Google doesn’t want to reach smart people, they don’t want me using their products anymore. Therefore I am leaving Google products as much as I can. I have changed my primary search engine from Google to duckduckgo.com. I will move my calendar to another system.
Youtube. That’s a tough one, the community is so large. I try to rationalize my continued use of Youtube, because I don’t see it as part of Google. But now under this light of Google wanting to reach the wide masses of the stupids, it becomes very clear why Google owns Youtube. Read the comments on any Youtube post, and you’ll see what I mean by the masses of stupids. These are the people that Google wants to reach now.
Google no longer uses the criteria if the product is good keep it and develop revenue streams off it. Google ONLY wants to reach hundreds of millions of people. Period. You simply don’t know what product they will kill next. I have absolutely no trust in Google anymore to keep any product alive.
True. You never know what they are going to kill off next. Not to mention I still have access to old labs that were supposed to be cut off… and yet still have access to.
Killing off parts of service or products is one thing I do feel is a by-product, if you will, of our “post-industrial” web-conomy. Linkedin for example, much worse as I realized they stopped questions. While I never went down that road, I do remember considering spending an ample amount of time to help others to showcase a skill-set in various “skills” via questions. I now feel bad for anyone who do. I don’t think it lives on or in existence anywhere else. At least Google has takeout.
Hmmm. suddenly have a craving for an egg-roll. 😉
I admire Google providing the Takeout service. Many companies cower in fear of people exporting their data and leaving. But Takeout actually does the opposite. I know I can use Google products, because at any point, I can export my data. I tend to be leery of using services that do not provide a way to archive all your work.
At the start, there were Twitter services that allowed you export your 2,000 most recent tweets. Thus, I felt comfort in spending time tweeting. Then came the dark period where Twitter shut off all the third-party archive services
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