Om Malik Boycotting Google Keep Because of Google Reader
Posted by Bob Warfield on March 21, 2013
Om’s boycotting Google Keep, and he’s damned right–every word he wrote.
Here’s the money quote for me:
It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.
I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.
Looking from that perspective, it is hard to trust Google to keep an app alive.
Google is now squarely in the Evil Doing Business, and it will cost them over time to get back out of that penalty box. Regardless of how well Google Reader may have been doing in terms of revenue and strategic objectives, it was doing what it did for the wrong people to be messing with, starting with Om Malik. I say that because the primary users were the very people who write the news on the web. That’s a tough audience to make angry.
If Google was as smart as they claim to be, they’d issue an apology to everyone involved and make Google Reader promise to keep Google Reader happy and healthy for at least 5 more years before evaluating the decision again.
Vaughan Merlyn said
My sentiments entirely!
What If You Fired Your 8 Million Most Influential Users? « SmoothSpan Blog said
[…] Om Malik Boycotting Google Keep Because of Google Reader […]
Mary Baum (@marybaum) said
On this score, Google comes out as more evil than Facebook: FriendFeed lives!
Actually, it would appear that the name of doing-the-right-thing both now and in that instance is the same: Buchheit.
Keep in mind I only know these stories second-hand, or farther. Perhaps I know nothing.
Still …
Paul Buchheit apparently coined the don’t-be-evil mantra when he was at Google.
April Buchheit, as a condition of the sale to Facebook, insisted that FriendFeed had to stay alive.
It doesn’t get new features. Sometimes existing features break, and then stay broken for a loooong time. When there’s an outage, we have to find an actual person at FB to go look at the server.
But it lives.
Probably not forever.
But for four years and counting …
I actually subscribed to you. Stop by and say hey – we’ll say hey back!
What If You Fired Your 8 Million Most Influential Users? : Enterprise Irregulars said
[…] users is exactly what Google is doing as it shelves Google Reader in less than a month. Google is firing the likes of Om Malik, for example, and Seth Godin who says RSS is still the most efficient way of reading blogs. […]