When he came to
Over the course of nearly the next three years, Shih watched as Reader was first stripped down and then put into maintenance, the hospice care of the Internet world. When he began the role, little did he know he would be the last to hold it.
Shih left Google in 2011 but still thinks about the demise of the beloved product. In a phone interview last Friday, he criticized his former employer for shutting down Reader, calling it a missed opportunity.
Had Google kept Reader alive, Shih said, the company could have realized two main benefits: The product, he said, could have been used as a testing ground, or mini R&D lab, for Google’s social initiatives. And had Google let Reader continue to evolve, Shih believes it could have turned into a viable solution for the growing problem of information overload.
Solving The Information Overload Problem
RIP @googlereader :(
— Brian Shih (@bshih) March 13, 2013
“The reason I’m sad about Reader is not because it was shut down,” Shih said, “What I’m more sad about is the missed opportunity.” When asked to elaborate, Shih explained that while he was upset at Reader’s shutdown, the bigger loss was that it never developed into the product it could have been.
Shih described a problem with today’s Internet where information, now consumed via social streams on platforms like Twitter and
Google Reader set out to tackle this problem but only reached a certain point before it was put into maintenance. With time, Shih said, it could have evolved into a product that could have helped solve the problem.
“If we had been given more freedom in terms of thinking about solving the problem of information overload across multiple sources, I think there would have been a lot of potential there,” Shih said. “Having a product that can take in different sources, figure out which ones are most important to you, and then lets you consume them in a way that is efficient and improves the signal to noise ratio can be very valuable.”
That, Shih said, is the pitch he wishes he would have given to Google leadership while he was still at the company. Instead, he said, his pitch focused on the product's usefulness as a mechanism to centralize data. “Our pitch was just about the plumbing,” he explained.
But Shih added the product’s potential is something Google leadership should have understood on their own. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible-- that seems like a very obvious fit for that mission,” he said.
The Social R&D Lab
Shih also described Reader as a place where social innovation flourished. Sharing, friending and comments were all once part of Google Reader, and existed even before the company decided to invest heavily in social. “We tried three completely different friend models all beforeGoogle Plus lunched,” Shih said. Not all those experiments went smoothly. Reader, for example, was once accused of ruining Christmas because of a tweak that exposed private data.
The point, according to Shih, is that Reader could have been used as place to incubate and experiment with social functionality before deploying the functionality to other products like Google Plus. “We had always been a really small team anyway,” he said. “It seems like it would have been an appropriate thing to keep as a place for innovation.”
Shih Today
After Google Reader was put into maintenance, Shih went to work on Google Finance before finally leaving Google in 2011, frustrated after working on products the company seemed not to care about. If he had worked on core product like Maps, Android or Chrome, Shih acknowledged, he probably would have had more of an impact.
But that would have meant giving up working on Reader, a product he was passionate about, for something perhaps less exciting. It's hard to imagine Google would have benefited from such a move though, as people like Shih, who dedicated themselves to working on non-core products, helped turn experiments like Gmail and Google News into important parts of the Google ecosystem.
If Google employees decide to play it safe as opposed to working on riskier projects, the company might miss out on its next big innovation as a result, something it is going to have to live with in a post-Reader world.
Follow Alex Kantrowitz on Twitter: Follow @Kantrowitz
