All right, so I have a slight bone to pick with Marco. This is actually a fairly well-written article and I'm glad that people are engaging with it elsewhere in the comments, but I'm just a bit confused that he's choosing to write it <i>now</i>, and about Google Reader than about, say, Reading List. Remember? That product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Instapaper? Or iCloud, that product that Apple released for free and that was a direct competitor to Dropbox? Or Ping, that product that Apple released for free and then shitcanned after not enough people used it?<p>Marco's response to Reading List (and its integration into not only OS X but iOS) wasn't "this is predatory pricing! Regulate!" but instead "this might be good for my product" [1].<p>So, I don't really know. I didn't use Reader, but I understand that people are upset that it's getting cancelled. That does suck. Of course, this is apparently what everyone deserves for daring to use a free product? But actually it's okay because we'll all be better off because of the great RSS reader renaissance that is upon us? Oh god I can't keep this straight any more. Go find a new RSS reader. RSS appears to have weathered the predation of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ admirably so far; I doubt that its days are numbered.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper</a>
I see no difference between Google Reader shutting down and Apple abandoning the Mac Pro.<p>This has nothing to do with free: it has to do with a failed product like any other, plain and simple. People don't see Google Reader as a failed product because they like it and "a lot of people use it". But that "a lot" is in absolute terms, not relative ones. The reality is that not enough people use RSS for it to matter at Google scale. Even if everyone currently using it were to start paying for it tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket of Google profits. Reader had it's chance, and it failed to get enough traction, period. The "free" part is just a distraction in this conversation, Reader makes no sense as a product for Google at any (reasonable) price. This story would have gone down exactly the same had Google offered reader at a price that matched the other competitors at the time: they probably still would have won, and still would have ended up shutting it down.<p>This is exactly the same as how having the Mac Pro line would be incredibly lucrative for you or me, but it just doesn't matter for Apple. The margins are through the roof on that thing, and in a lot of ways its quite possibly the perfect product: a 3 year old machine that commands the same price it did 3 years ago. But again, not enough people <i>want</i> it for it to matter at Apple scale. If Apple could double the price and maintain the same sale numbers of the Mac Pro, it still wouldn't be worth it for them.<p>If anything, we should see this as a really healthy market correction. Its good for Google to realize that this isn't worth their time so they can focus their resources on things only they can do (like cars that drive themselves and whatnot) and leave these tasks for the rest of us where these user numbers and profits <i>are</i> meaningful.
I agree with the article in many respects, but I find there's a giant blind spot that needs addressing given the author.<p>I don't understand how Marco can't view Apple as a proprietary monoculture, and one that is somewhat worse in the sense that you can't clone the features of it without being sued (what if Reader had patents covering it and sued if you tried to create a clone?)<p>Apple frequently force upgrades users and develoeprs, some would say by planned obsolescence. For example, early on in IOS, people built apps that allowed in-app purchases and subscriptions, because Apple had no API for them, so we had a federated, open system for that feature. Then Apple changed their T&C and mandate use of Apple infrastructure to do this, and people now have to resort to hacks (remember Dropbox getting banned because of a link to sign up?) Slowly, the apps were forced onto Apple monoculture services.<p>Basically, when Apple introduces monoculture, it is viewed as a good. It simplifies user experience, etc. But for everyone else, it's somehow bad and evil.
An entrepreneur is sent to jail for selling widgets. Upon arrival he meets two other businessmen who are locked-up. He asks them, "Why are you here?"<p>The first guy responds, "I sold widgets for more than anyone else, and they jailed me for excessive profits."<p>The second guy responds, "I sold widgets at the same price as everyone else, and they jailed me for price collusion."<p>They ask him, "What'd you do?"<p>The entrepeneur responds, "I sold widgets for lower than anyone else, so they jailed me for predatory pricing!"
Some solid points here, but I gotta disagree with this one...<p><i>If a product grows huge quickly, which almost always requires it to be free, it will probably be acquired for a lot of money. Free products that don’t grow quickly enough can usually die with an “acquihire”, which lets everyone save face and ensures that the investors get something out of the deal.</i><p>I think this way of thinking is the product of a very frothy market over the last few years. Now, I'm not one to scream series A crunch from the mountain tops, but it's unrealistic to think that thousands of these startups that "don't grow quickly enough" will be acquihired. In 2012 Google and Facebook combined to make 21 acquisitions. That doesn't put much of a dent in the number of failing startups. And with the Formspring shutdown announcement last week, it seems that even companies that have achieved impressive scale (30M users in since 2010) cannot rely on being bought.
The analogy to predatory pricing doesn't work because in the brick and mortar world, you drive out your competitors so that you may <i>raise your prices</i>. So the price is said to be artificially lowered.<p>In the software world, free software products <i>stay free</i> even after they have become the dominant platform. The price is not artificially lowered to zero; at scale the cost of operating a free service is lower than the advertising revenue generated by it. This is actually the "natural" price for the product.
Rarely if ever do I find myself in agreement with Marco, but he articulates a valid point quite well. Monopolies and effective monopolies are obviously quite detrimental to the web, especially when they fail.<p>But, there is little that can be done about the tendency for monopolies to emerge within the web ecosystem, only to fail. If companies were to charge or advertise heavily from day one, it would effectively preclude any sort of viral, meteoric rise, because the overwhelming number of prospective users would turn their nose up at it. Most companies would never achieve widespread success. On the other hand, a lack of an organized business strategy leaves companies scrambling to devise revenue sources, as is happening with Facebook and their absurd gift card thing. Either one can try to make money and be relegated to obscurity, or one can become popular and end up exasperated at their inability to make money. There is very little opportunity to become both wildly successful and fiscally viable; that is why most companies fail.<p>As a user, I would prefer a lack of business model to a lack of a business: better to have an RSS reader (or social network, or mail client/to-do app) that lacks substancial income for 8 years than one with a direct business model that never gets off the ground.
Not sure why there isn't more of a discussion going on, given the uproar over Reader, I found the whole article insightful but especially the end. The concluding 3 paragraphs are like the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense.
OP is trying to make it seem like offering web services for free is rule-breaking or even borderline illegal. This is not so. It is not predatory pricing to price something at its marginal cost (which for web services is near-zero).<p>The OP also seems to be unaware of TV, radio, etc.
I think this argument is disorganized. It reads as if he's arguing for free in favor of paid (which I don't really agree with), but I think he's actually arguing for open in favor of closed (which I do agree with).<p>The predatory pricing thing is a problem for a lot of people. I've most recently come across it with a friend trying to start his graphic-design business who was upset about discovering that "99 designs" website. Before that it was a bass player for our band that was strenuously principled that we should never accept a gig "for exposure", and should also not play with musicians that had a history of accepting free gigs, since it was "disrespectful" to the players that were trying to make a living at it. While I do agree that there are moderating counterpoints to both, they do bring up relevant concerns.<p>Meanwhile, you have Radiohead and Nine-Inch-Nails, both of whom experimented with releasing their music for free way back when. When it "worked", everyone championed how it was the way forward for the music industry - how music was a "service", how the recordings should be loss-leader marketing expenses for the paid service of live performances. Overlooking the people who were more focused on the recording side of things, and the fact that those two bands had built-in fanbases. Years later, both bands are moving on from the "free" model, while so many people are misguidedly releasing their tracks for free that indie songwriters are <i>paying</i> money to even get their signed-up fans to listen to their new tracks.<p>I'm not so sure that the conclusion is that free works, as it is accepting that free works by being predatory and that there can be consequences that hurt others. And it isn't exactly ethical to accept a negative consequence on behalf of someone else. This is not to say that going free is <i>wrong</i> - sometimes there is a bigger picture that might make it worthwhile for all (for instance, many open source techs that have created new marketplaces that have enabled many people to make a living). But the argument does not reduce down to something as simple as free works, therefore free is good.
I don't usually upvote Marco.org articles but this one was very good. Before Reader there was a vibrant (niche, but vibrant) market for RSS readers. Reader decimated that market and arguably killed innovation in RSS altogether. I remember when PubSubHubBub and RSS Cloud came out and wondered why anyone would bother implementing them for feeds when all that mattered was if Google Reader was fetching your stuff fast enough (it was).<p>It's going to be interesting to see how things develop in the wake of the shutdown. There's already a mad rush to provide alternatives, and a bunch of open source readers are in heavy development (I'm using Selfoss personally: <a href="https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss</a>). It might turn out that Reader shutting down is the best thing that could have happened.
It's because of people like Marco Arment, offering their written content for predatory pricing, that the newspaper industry is going bankrupt.<p>Let's illegalize free blogs!
"Our best option is to avoid supporting and using proprietary monocultures."
Said the man who makes a magazine that only works on iPads and loves developing for a platform controlled by one single company in California that is prone to suppressing political content or apps that might compete with its own. Nice.
And, after WebDav and RSS, IMAP support for Gmail will become "insufficient to support great new features" so it will be decommissioned in favor of a great new API. Just wait...
Free works, but for whom? Certainly a lot of companies are doing well by giving away everything, but how long will the acquihire exit strategy remain open? Furthermore, the user is getting absolutely screwed. There have been a lot of notable services that have popped up over the last few years and then some big company came in to pick up the talent and dumped the product and subsequently its users.<p>I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google. Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS. Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for it's millions of users.<p>It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.<p>My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm okay with investing time in adopting a free service.<p>However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves (probably a minority), they could do so with ease.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-reader" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-...</a>
Lower costs in this market are also something that makes open source possible, I just found two opensource projects inspired by Google Reader and hosted on Google Code, what do you think of them?<p><a href="http://selfoss.aditu.de/" rel="nofollow">http://selfoss.aditu.de/</a><p><a href="http://gobblerss.pommepause.com/screenshot.html" rel="nofollow">http://gobblerss.pommepause.com/screenshot.html</a>
Apps like Feedly and NewsBlur were managing to survive before the Google Reader announcement. If you build something good, and market it well, with niche like features - enough people will be happy to pay for it to keep you and the product going.
I think author fails to recognize paid services that eventually fail because of the barrier is never able to become a sustainable business. Wouldn't it be worse by paying for something then losing it ? There are plenty of free offerings that are able to become sustainable businesses through various business models. I think the distinction is rather the choices of the founder + acceleration of growth vs paid / free model.<p>edit:<p>Every business that deals with some sort of digital goods today has to compete with free.. music, movies, games, etc. So maybe we should all just sit around and say how unfair it is rather than to figure out how to compete. Its a completely ridiculous argument
The golden rule is there's no golden rules.<p>Everything can work, and everything has its advantages and flaws. You just need to know where you're, and have a strategy to succeed based on your business model.
Writing software is not cheap, or even close to free. Even if you can host it for a low price, there are still other associated costs that people ever talk about. Mostly the time spent trying to win the freemium lottery (and getting acquihired).
the one thing that i haven't seen mentioned, in all this chatter about how "RSS is dead" -<p>RSS feeds are free in both beer and speech, and were likely authored (or co-authored) by Aaron Swartz to be that way. The Google Pluses of the world, not so much...