Microsoft was nicer than Google

Google recently announced that they will be terminating their "Google Reader" service. The announcement drew a fair amount of attention.

The termination of Google Reader shows us that Microsoft was much better than Google. The reaction from "the rest of us" shows us that we have certain expectations of software vendors.

Really.

Let's start with Microsoft.

Microsoft has, over the years, offered many products. The list includes operating systems (MS-DOS and Windows), languages (BASIC, Visual Basic, FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++, C#, F#, and even Pascal), office tools (Word, Multiplan, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Project), games, databases, and more.

It's an impressive list. What's more impressive is the lifetime of most of those offerings.

Microsoft offered MS-DOS from 1981 until, um, some time in the 1990s when Windows 95 was released. It offered Windows (in one form or another from the mid 1980s until today (and it keeps offering it). Microsoft's BASIC has a longer history than MS-DOS, starting in the late 1970s and continuing to today. These products have been continuously offered to customers.

Now, I recognize that the products changed over time. MS-DOS grew over time, adding features and capabilities. Windows also grew. BASIC had significant changes, especially in its "Visual Basic" stages.

Microsoft may have changed its products, but it (usually) provided a path forward. MS-DOS 2.0 was replaced by MS-DOS 3.1, which in turn was replaced by MS-DOS 3.3. Windows 3.1 was replaced by Windows 95. BASIC was replaced by Visual Basic (and there were several of those), and Visual Basic 6 was replaced by VB.NET.

Some replacements were easy, and some were difficult. But they were there.

Yes, I know that some products were withdrawn with no replacement. The IronPython and IronRuby projects were terminated. The Visual J# compiler has faded into oblivion. There was no successor for Microsoft "Bob". You can add your favorite discontinued product to this list.

All in all, Microsoft has been very good at providing successor products. Perhaps this is because of the revenue that licenses provide. When Microsoft discontinues a product, it wants people to pay for a new product. What better way to keep customers than to offer a new version?

Now let's look at Google.

Google's advertising-driven revenue provides different incentives. Revenue is not generated by users (for most products). Instead, revenue comes from advertising. That advertising revenue powers the development and support of products.

Some Google products are experiments, explorations of markets and possibly technology. (Google's App Engine comes to mind as an exploration of cloud computing.)

If a product is not performing (insufficient advertising revenue), then the logical decision is to replace it with a new platform for advertising. But that new platform does not have to offer anything close to the features of the prior product.

I suspect that the outrage at Google's decision to terminate Reader was caused in part by surprise. We, the users of software, expected Google to act like Microsoft. When they did not, when Google acted in a way that varied from our expectations, we became angry.

Which is ironic, as a lot of us always cheered Google for *not* acting like Microsoft.