{"id":271,"date":"2013-03-27T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.b.shuttle.de\/hayek\/Hayek\/Jochen\/wp\/blog-en\/2013\/03\/27\/the-demise-of-google-reader-stability-as-a-service\/"},"modified":"2020-05-13T16:58:35","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T14:58:35","slug":"the-demise-of-google-reader-stability-as-a-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/2013\/03\/27\/the-demise-of-google-reader-stability-as-a-service\/","title":{"rendered":"The demise of Google Reader: Stability as a service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tThe demise of Google Reader: Stability as a service<\/a>:
\nOm Malik\u2019s brief post<\/a> on the demise of Google Reader<\/a> raises a good point: If we can\u2019t trust Google to keep successful applications around, why should we bother trying to use their new applications, such as Google Keep<\/a>?
\nGiven the timing, the name is ironic. I\u2019d definitely like an application similar to Evernote, but with search that actually worked well; I trust Google on search. But why should I use Keep if the chances are that Google is going to drop it a year or two from now?
\"Google\"Google
\nIn the larger scheme of things, Keep is small potatoes. Google is injuring themselves in ways that are potentially much more serious than the success or failure of one app. Google is working on the most ambitious re-envisioning of computing since the beginning of the PC era: moving absolutely everything to the cloud. Minimal local storage; local disk drives, whether solid state or rust-based, are the problem, not the solution. Projects like Google Fiber show that they\u2019re interested in seeing that people have enough bandwidth so that they can get at their cloud storage fast enough so that they don\u2019t notice that it isn\u2019t local.
\nIt\u2019s a breath-taking vision, on many levels: I should be able to have access to all of my work, regardless of the device I\u2019m using or where it\u2019s located. A mobile phone shouldn\u2019t be any different from a desktop. I may not want to write software on a mobile phone (I can\u2019t imagine coding on those tiny touch keyboards), but I should be able to if I want to. And I should definitely be able to take a laptop into the hills and work transparently over a 4G network.
\nFurthermore, why should I worry about local storage? The most common cause for throwing a computer on the bone pile is disk drive failure. Granted, I keep machines around for a long time, so by the time the disk drive fails, it\u2019s more than time for an upgrade. But local disks require backups; backups are a pain; and it\u2019s all too common for something to go wrong when you\u2019re doing a restore. I\u2019d prefer to leave backups to a professional in a data center. For that matter, there are many things I\u2019d rather leave to a data center ops group: malware detection, authentication, software updates, you name it. Most of the things that make computing a pain disappear when you move them to the cloud.
\nSo I\u2019ve written two paragraphs about what\u2019s wonderful about Google\u2019s vision. Here\u2019s what sucks. How can I contemplate moving everything to the cloud, especially Google\u2019s cloud, if services are going to flicker in and out of existence at the whim of Google\u2019s management? That\u2019s a non-starter. Google has scrapped services in the past, and though I\u2019ve been sympathetic with the people who complained about the cancellation, they\u2019ve been services that haven\u2019t reached critical mass. You can\u2019t say that about Google Reader. And if they\u2019re willing to scrap Google Reader, why not Google Docs? I bet more people use Reader than Docs. What if they kill the Prediction API<\/a>, and you rely on that? There are alternatives to Reader, there may be alternatives to Docs (though most of the ones I knew have died on the vine), but I don\u2019t know of anything remotely like the Prediction API. I could go on with \u201cwhat ifs\u201d forever (Authentication API? Web Optimizer?), but you get the point.
\nIf Google is serious about providing a platform that lets us move all of our computing to the cloud, they need to provide a stable platform. So far, the tools are great, but Google gets a #fail for stability. Google understands the Internet far better than its competitors, but they\u2019re demonstrating that they don\u2019t understand their users\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The demise of Google Reader: Stability as a service: Om Malik\u2019s brief post on the demise of Google Reader raises a good point: If we can\u2019t trust Google to keep successful applications around, why should we bother trying to use their new applications, such as Google Keep? Given the timing, the name is ironic. I\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[136,666],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feed-reading","category-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paO0kP-4n","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11050,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/11050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jochen.hayek.name\/blog-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}