25 March 2013

AllThingsD: “Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance”

But the shutdown wasn’t just a matter of company culture and bigger priorities, sources said. Google is also trying to better orient itself so that it stops getting into trouble with repeated missteps around compliance issues, particularly privacy.

That means every team needs to have people dedicated to dealing with these compliance and privacy issues — lawyers, policy experts, etc. Google didn’t even have a product manager or full-time engineer responsible for Reader when it was killed, so the company didn’t want to add in the additional infrastructure and staff, the sources said. Liz Gannes

This must be the lamest excuse for shutting down a product I’ve heard in a while! If was so deeply integrated into Google Apps, why not just use the policy experts for Google Apps to oversee Reader as well? Also why would every team need dedicated experts after unified the privacy policies of most services last year? Sorry, but I don’t buy this for one second!

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