Focusing On The Google Reader Shutdown

Last week Google announced the shutdown of Google Reader as part of its company wide bid to “focus” on “fewer products.” “We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go,” wrote the company in a blog post. comScore estimates that as many as 665,000 different people used the mobile app in recent months, according to the Financial Times. The product appears to have been well-loved among users, with a monthly active user base estimated to be around one million according to a competitor. Given the relatively small impact a Google Reader sunsetting could have on the company’s billion dollar operating expenses, a highly visible shutdown like that of Google Reader seems to be at least in part to send a message (among the vocal blog readers seem to be the bloggers themselves). The message is that Google is not just focusing on fewer products, but focusing on the things that most people are going to use. And if that’s the new standard by which things will be measured by Google, expect more changes to come as Google’s executive leadership continues to change. “Powering down” Google Reader effective July 1 was a tough decision and the arguably the biggest property execs have felled since the November 2011 shutdown of Google Wave (in addition to closures, several products have been folded together). The move is reminiscent of Yahoo’s 2010 shutdown of beloved bookmarking service Delicious, and the public response seems to be the same as then, too: given strong user loyalty and the mature stage of product development there might have been more peripheral ways to other ways for the Internet giant to rationalize its operational belt, such as a sale or targeting more peripheral products. Although the shutdown of Google Reader would seem to message new focus for the Internet advertising company, it’s in fact the same focus from elsewhere being mainstreamed into the fold. Google started to leave RSS discovery out of Chrome years ago, opting instead to make it a 3rd party feature for which you’d need to use a plugin. A Chrome developer explained at the time the decision was “based on our philosophy of trying to limit ourselves to adding only the UI features that a vast majority of users need.” (In fact, Chrome is not the only browser maker to come to have doubts over the continued role of

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