A very common mistake entrepreneurs make is to assume that a
feature is not necessary because it doesn’t have a lot of usage, thus it can be
safely removed from the product. Sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes, not
so much.
Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will
have severe ripple effects to its empire. I know a lot has been written about
it, but let me give you a different angle on it.
Microsoft Word, circa mid-90s
This is not my story, but a story of a friend who I worked
with at Microsoft. He once told me Microsoft removed the “word count” feature
on a Beta Preview version of Word it sent to journalists to review (I can’t
recall if it was on purpose, a bug, or the feature was just more hidden).
Microsoft knew about it but didn’t care because it had data that showed that
feature was just minimally used.
You get the picture to what happen next. Journalists,
because of the nature of their work, were obsessed about that one tiny feature.
It wasn’t a critical feature that prevented them from doing their job, but it
was a feature that made their life that much easier. According to this friend
from Microsoft, the reviews of MS Word were awful and the flagship argument was
that the new Word didn’t have a word count feature.
Social multiplier
What happens here is simple. Decisions makers and
influencers carry a much stronger weight in product decision than the average
user. That’s pretty well known on the Enterprise world. You don’t sell MS
Outlook by convincing employees of a big company that Outlook is great. You
sell Outlook by convincing the CIO and the IT team responsible to evaluate
options of email client. They care not only what their employees will use, but
also about how easy it will be for them.
Three self-inflicted wounds
First, Google says that it “gets” social, but you can’t
“get” social if you don’t get the concept of an influencer. By killing a
product that was beloved and heavily used by most influencers, you start to
alienate those folks. Killing a product like Picnik with tens of millions of
users, might have less impact on the business than killing a product with less
than a million users, where most of those users are influencers. The number of
users alone is not a metric that should be used to decide which products live
or die. You must, at a minimum, include a profit-per-unit-of-effort and the
strategic value (the amplifier effect) of the product (and the users of that
product). Loss leader is not a bad strategy. Actually, most products at Google
are loss leaders.
Second, Google just indirectly wounded many of its products,
like Feedburner (which they probably don’t give a shit about it anymore, but
they don’t know how to kill it since all those links are out there and it can’t
be replaced), but most importantly it wounded Blogger. Google didn’t figure out
how to make Blogger into a better product. Tumblr and WordPress continue to
grow and dominate the short-form publishing out there. What surprises me is
that the more pages and more page-views on the web, the better it’s for Google
who primary monetization mechanic is primarily driven by ads (and AdWords /
AdSense combo).
Third, and lastly, Google is sending a strong signal to the
market that it will have no mercy of killing whatever product it doesn’t think
it’s going well. It just told users, professionals and enterprises that we all
should not use any product from Google if requires long term commitment (not
business-type commitment, but data and emotional commitment) unless we have a
sense that’s going to succeed. Now, I have to be in the business of evaluating
Google’s product long-term viability before I can commit. Sure, I’m pretty sure
Gmail is not going away, but what about Google Talk and Google Wallet? What
about Picassa or YouTube?
Oh, and I’m pissed with Google Reader going away. I used it
3-10 times a day to consume about 100+ feeds. It wasn’t the awesome product
that I wish it could have been, but it was the best out there.
PS: Irony not lost this blog post is on Blogger and 2,000+ people might read it on Google Reader. Good bye you.
For transparency's sake my job is a competitor of FeedBurner's and a lot of our business comes from people fleeing that sinking ship.
ReplyDeleteI hear your argument, but what was the incentive for Google to keep Reader? In its current form it diverts revenue from AdSense and although it has an extremely loyal following, those numbers are relatively small.
When I covered the local blog circuit for our newspaper, I consumed hundreds of blogs through Reader and I was a huge promoter of the product. As my career has evolved, I've stepped back from it and in my new role only use it to troubleshoot misbehaving feeds.
There are alternative ways to consume RSS that are monetized and come with dedicated support. I am both happy for and sympathetic to what those at Feedly and others must be going through right now, a huge influx of new users is trial by fire.
Killing off Reader is, as you suggest likely a part of FeedBurner's sunset. What incentive other than goodwill does Google have for keeping FeedBurner / Reader? As a publicly traded company goodwill has less importance than it used to. They, despite intentions, have to answer to the board. FeedBurner was poorly monetized and even that stream has been cut, now all it does is siphon money. Free has a cost and this wasn't even created on the freemium model.