Yeah, it's terrible when a company gives something away for free, then decides to stop.
Shame on them.
How would it have been any better if they had discontinued something out of the blue they had charged money for? (which incidentally, they HAVE done to me, see below)
I would have had no problem if they had wanted to monetize it with ads or even a small subscription fee. But we're talking about a company who has 20% of their budget allocated to zany shit that will never earn them a dime just because it sounds cool to do.
But what this does is make me lose further confidence in google's willingness to stick to their guns and their other products, products they provided and encouraged me to become dependent upon both personally and professionally. Google Apps, Gmail, hell, they did this VERY thing to my company when they decided to get into radio by buying Scott Studios/Dmarc (who made the automation my radio stations run) and then unceremoniously gave the industry a collective "never mind," ceased development/support and put the assets up for sale where they got eventually bought by Scott's chief competitor who now has a near monopoly on the radio automation software market. Google is largely responsible for half the technical difficulty I've had to deal with since 2006. Not to mention how they basically just bought the place, and then
fired everybody after their first halfhearted effort didn't start raining money like their web advertising did:
In February, March and April 2009 Google fired 40 of their best radio automation technicians, system builders, support staff and—yes—all but one of the software developers who wrote any SS32 source code. Since Google's decision to exit radio in February, the majority of the brains of SS32, Scott Studios and dMarc Broadcasting have been fired. We can show you the press reports, LinkedIn and Facebook pages of most of the 40 people Google terminated. Even now, WideOrbit (the competitor that bought the leftover remains - GB) hasn't announced it has hired any of them.
So spare me your sarcasm about my growing google grudge.[DOUBLEPOST=1363362087][/DOUBLEPOST]Heh, not that it will change any minds at google, but the change.org
petition to keep google reader alive just passed 100,000 signatures.