Not what you think it means

Simple question; given Google now has an established history of killing products in public use - Reader simply being the most established one so far - are you willing to pick up whatever new free gewgaw Google presents to the world and absorb it into your online life?

I use Gmail, whatever the news collection thing's called (not Reader ), the Play Store, Currents, and most importantly, Android.

Of all that, the store and Android are the ones that would cause a bit of a panic if it came to it; the others aren't essential.

They have already cancelled this product. They had an equivalent years ago, which they canned (notebook).

Given that I have started using several Google products in the last year, which have all been cancelled, such as Listen, sky map and reader, I get the feeling, that every time I find a Google product useful, it is cancelled a couple of weeks later...

Dave, stop using Google products, then the rest of us can continue to enjoy them

There is the other issue of will it ever come out of beta? I do use the search but that is a core part of their business. Though for other products I am much more reluctant. Especially the risk of getting tied into a dead format if they decided to end Google Docs for example.

I doubt they'd drop Google Docs, they make a fair amount of money by selling a variant of google docs to businesses who want to host their stuff 'in the cloud'. The point probably is that anything that Google gives away for free, it can drop without much notice and regardless of how many people use it (the fact Feedly put on 500,000 users in two days after the end of Reader was announced suggests at least 500,000 people used Reader..). therefore, any data stored in those kind of service should be considered fragile and any process you develop that includes those services should be considered at risk. Because they could be lost if not at any moment at least with a relatively short amount of notice.

Course this is also true of any other free service on the internet; the company hosting it may run out of money or be bought put and their terms may change or the service be lost. In essence it's just a new version of an old principle - 'you get what you pay for'.

I've not signed up with Feedly yet, I tried NetVibes first, but it isn't really what I am looking for.

I agree, but I am more than happy to pay for shareware especially if it does what I need. If free you realise that there has to be a reason. With Dropbox you know that there are paid upgrades, and I might actually sign up for that at some point especially if I use up my free allowance.

I read that blog post when it featured on CP's news letter, and several others in a similar vain. Old bloggers tend to be big on RSS!

To answer your question, no I wouldn't put all my eggs in a free basket I didn't think would stay the course... unless I had an exit plan. If the product was totally unique, then my exit plan would be to do whatever it is I'm doing already. Google have always been very good at ensuring users have plenty of time and assistance with backing up their data before services close, so nothing irreplaceable is lost. At the very worst, you're back were you started - living life without it.

Although I use a lot of Google cloud services, they're mostly ones which I feel are pretty safe. Namely search, Gmail, Google Drive and Android store. They generate revenue and could be considered core services. I did back up my Gmail to a local disk, but I've not bothered for a while. I probably should, just in case I lose my internet for an extended duration rather than any other reason. It's not really that important; just personal stuff. My contacts are backed up though, locally and to the cloud. My Google drive is just one of 4 free cloud services used in conjunction with a NAS as well as my local hard disk to store data that is valuable to me.

It doesn't matter if they drop Android. It won't stop working because it's not a cloud service, and other people can continue developing it. This is similar to what happened with Google App Inventor - it was taken over by MIT, but anyone could host their own anyway because it was all in the public domain.

I did play with that weird Google social thing which I forget the name of, but it was flaky and unpopular so they dropped it. That made me a little sad because I thought it was a fantastic concept with real potential. I think it may have been ahead of it's time. All the data has now migrated to a different company, but I can't remember the name of that either! It's still not popular.

I've toyed with buying a Chromebook. Most of them can run a more normal Linux distro, so it wouldn't matter if support was dropped for the OS. It's the hardware cost that puts me off, along with the fact I already have 5 different portable computing platforms. Which is enough already.

I'm on G+ but I don't care if it dies. It's cool, but I can still follow the interesting folks on other media. RSS being one of them, ironically.

Although Reader was the most popular RSS aggregator, it wasn't actually that popular in the grand scale of Google. Only a very few million people used it. I had never even heard of it. It's also quite expensive to maintain (a hell of a lot harder than you might think because of synchronising infinite lists) and generates no revenue. It might have been preferable if they'd started charging for it rather than cancelling it, but I don't think the market was big enough for them to care about. It was killed by Twitter.

Another related blog I read recently suggested the demise of Reader was good. By being so dominant it was stifling innovation. To some people, Reader was RSS and they didn't know there was an alternative.

I am a "Google Power User". I rely so heavily on Google services these days that I am loath to use anything but an Android handset (or tablet), as shifting to Windows Phone or something else would be a real PITA.

I am heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, and yes I would be narked if they axed something I used. However, this can happen with any software and any company.

The only thing that would really annoy me is if I sat here buying films, music etc through Google Play, only for Google to pull the plug. But then again, the same argument can go for iTunes.

Indeed so. As I say I think the chances of paid-for services, or services which provide paid-for content, disappearing is slim (the legal storm it would generate would be something to see) but anything that's 'paid for by being used' i.e. ad or demographic info based revenue is only as healthy as the political power shifts inside Google allow it to be.

Jon

I'll use google, and give them the minimum I can - one shot email adresses etc.

I wouldnt trust them , or microsoft, or apple, or facebook, or prety much anyone else online.

I trust Google more than I trust Apple..... But that doesn't mean I trust Google.
But with regards to them stopping products like this. Surely you sould have that information/data backed up at home just in case anyway?

It's Googles software. They can discontinue it if they like. If it's free and you come to rely on it and then the vendor decides to stop providing it, well there's really no recourse for complaint.
You just have to shrug and get on with looking for alternatives.

Mark

Really? why? To me they're both corporations ruled entirely by self interest. Both equally likely to do good or ill to me or you depending on which makes them the most profit. Neither of them care a jot about you or me as individuals.


Agreed, but too many people seem to be seduced by putting everything 'in the cloud' without any real consideration of proper data security.