Showing posts with label Reader. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reader. Show all posts

July 3, 2013

Google Hypocrisy?

Google, which touts itself as the one that "organize[s] the world's information and make[s] it universally accessible and usable," ended its Reader product on Monday, July 1. 

The RSS reader was a terrific tool for aggregating content feeds on the Internet (and Google is a terrific company that benefits the whole world's thirst for knowledge).

With Google Reader you could subscribe to tens or hundreds of news services, blogs, and other information feeds and read it on your desktop or mobile device. 

Reader represented the Google mission itself by pulling together all this information and making it available in one reading place, simply and easily for anyone. 

While the Goolge line is that they killed Reader, because of a declining user base, I find this less then credible, since anecdotally it seems like a very popular tool that is helpful to people. Moreover, Google could've chosen to competitively enhance this product rather than just shut it down. 

So why did they end a great product that literally fits their mission perfectly?

We can only surmise that the ad clicks weren't there (and thus neither was the profit) or perhaps Google felt this product was cannibalizing attention from their other products like Google News (a limited aggregator) or from some of their paying ad sponsors or partners feeding other products like Google Glass.

We may never know the answer, but what we do know is that, in this case, Google sold out on it's core mission of organizing and providing information and abandoned their adoring userbase for Reader. 

Feedly and other more clunky readers are out there, but Google Reader is a loss for the information needy and desirous and a misstep by Google. 

RIP Reader, I think we will yet see you, in some form or fashion, yet again. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Laurie Pink)
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November 20, 2007

E-books and enterprise architecture

Does anyone really think you want to read a book on a computer screen?

Well, vendors like Sony with their "Reader" and Amazon with their new "Kindle" think you will.

However, while 110 million iPods have been sold, only 100,000 e-book readers have sold in North America. (The Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2007)

A Kindle costs $399 and downloading a best-seller is $9.99, while classics cost as little as $1.99. You can also get newspaper subscriptions online for a monthly subscription fee.

While Amazon has a wonderful vision "to have every book that has ever been in print available in less than 60 seconds," the core hurdle from a User-centric EA perspective needs to be addressed:

Users can and like to read size manageable documents online (like this blog, maybe), but a book on a screen does still not 'feel' natural and is tiring on users physically, mentally, and emotionally. The core requirement is for ergonomic reading and it's just not there!

While the current technology enables e-book reading without a backlight and "provides an experience that is akin to reading on paper, and users can even change the font size to make print larger and easier to read, the technology is not still user-friendly. Can you easily jump back and reread something? Can you easily highlight or underline? Can you annotate in the margins? Can you flip over the corner of the page to mark it as important? And with all these, can you do it in a way that is appealing to the various human sensation in a holistic way? Finally, can you easily experience (not just with a page number) your progress as you read through the book, so you can feel good about it?

As the article states: "he likes the physicality of a book and the sense of making progress as he reads." There is definitely a very human pleasure aspect missing in reading a book online and until vendors figures out the missing architectural components that links the user and the technology with an interface that is user-centric, the e-readers will continue to flounder.

The WSJ concludes that "even some dedicated fans of digital technology say they have their doubts about reading books in an electronic format," and for now so do I.
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