Why Google *really* killed Reader

[drwex]

http://www.marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown

Marco Arment has a pretty cogent analysis, which boils down to "because Facebook."

Worth reading.

Comments

[drwex]

I'm not offended.

All the standards you cite either were developed in days when companies saw the competitive landscape differently and/or were international body efforts and/or did not appear to allow others access to what companies saw as their proprietary grounds. When they did (e.g. Microsoft vs Java) they fought hard against.

As I think the original article argues, Apple and then Facebook changed the game. Apple has made a religion of doing things its own way, closing off the rest of the world, and being ridiculously successful at it. AOL failed at this game, but Facebook succeeded using essentially the same playbook as AOL tried. if you have two models in front of you: closed/proprietary/wildly successful or open/sharing/um... yeah, sort of less successful which model would you emulate? That's rhetorical - I'm just saying it's not an irrational move to emulate the big successes.

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

But it's not a question of repeating Facebook's domination -- it's a question of ending it. The same game is still running, and Facebook is winning handily. There's one well-known tactic for bringing down a vendor that's utterly dominating the market: team up against it. Facebook can beat Microsoft OR Google OR Apple OR Twitter OR IBM OR LinkedIn, but can it beat all of them working together against it? Not so likely. This is what everyone did with Java and Web Technologies against Microsoft, roughly speaking.

It seems like what folks are doing now is like if Sun had kept Java closed to the degree Microsoft would have, and tried to compete solo, 1-1 against Microsoft. Or everyone had stuck to their own propriety networking solution (think Novell and IBM Token Ring) instead of using Internet protocols. That would have been foolish of them, yes?

[drwex]

I admire your altruistic sense, but I don't think it's widely shared in a business context, which is seen as competitive first and cooperative only when necessary.

The question of whether Facebook could stand against a unified alliance is moot because such an alliance would be unstable at best, illegal under many circumstances, and unlikely ever to form. The business cost of fighting a group of competitors has to be weighed against the business costs of lowering barriers to entry (which is one thing standards do) and then allowing lots of other people in to compete.

I don't think Facebook sees Google or Microsoft as its biggest threats. Their real threat is going to be some company nobody has yet heard much about who will do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace and their ilk. To the extent that Facebook exposes APIs anyone can use, and subscribes to standards anyone can copy it's enabling that anonymous future entity to kill it faster and more easily.

And again, remember that your original supposition was that acting in a proprietary manner was not "plausible." I think this strategy is perfectly plausible. It may turn out in the long run to be inferior to your preferred cooperative strategy, but I don't see how you can continue to maintain its implausibility.