Google Reader is often held up as one of the prime examples of Google killing a product that users love and consider to be good. It died on July 1, 2013, and 10 years later, a new report goes in-depth on why that happened.
The Verge spoke with the original team and chronicled its inception, struggle to survive, and eventual death. One through line is that the original developers had a grand vision of the product becoming “the world’s best collaborative and intelligent web content delivery service,” or a social network with discussion capabilities that could also surface photos, videos, and podcasts.
There are various interesting company anecdotes throughout the piece, starting with how “Fusion” was the original name for Google Reader, but Marissa Mayer “wanted the name for another product and demanded the team pick another one.” The team believes that the eventual name — other alternatives brainstormed included “Reactor” and “Transmogrifier” — pigeonholed the product and did not capture the full vision.
Google Reader had over 30 million users at its peak. However, to executives, “Google scale” was hundreds of millions, and many thought it should just be a feature within another product, like Gmail, rather than being a stand-alone app. Reader never found an executive backer that saw the grand vision.
In terms of other cameos in the service’s history, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom was a product marketing manager – detailing new features – for Google Reader, while the product was apparently on Larry Page’s “list of Google’s worst 100 projects.”
Toward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for Google+. Its death started in early 2011 when Google Reader entered “maintenance mode,” where only critical issues were fixed. Google announced in March 2013 that Reader would be killed in a few months.
9to5Google’s Take
Looking back, it’s clear that Google Reader never had the institutional support to become a successful product and that — charitably — it was doomed when more people weren’t drawn to it at the beginning.
Meanwhile, if it were successful, the question is how it would have competed against today’s algorithmically curated feeds from Discover and Google News to the Facebook News Feed and Twitter.
Is there a large enough audience that wants to curate their own news sources, or do they prefer the simplicity that is the modern feed of news and articles with some topic-based customization options? As a reminder, Chrome for Android today offers an RSS reader of sorts with “Web Feed.”
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