This sounds a lot like the complaints heard in these precincts some years ago, after Evernote deep sixed its much beloved stand-alone version (2.2) and forced its users into the cloud, whether they liked it or not...
-xtabber
Yes, that sort of duress/blackmail/coercion is precisely why I shall
never use
Evernote again, and is a substantive reason that I advise clients of (when recommending that the service is best avoided). If a vendor can take that path with users once, then they can be expected to take it again. The lesson in this is that, from a marketing perspective, this sort of word-of-mouth negative publicity is one of the worst things that any product vendor might wish to create, but create it they did. It's not like it is a new lesson to learn, either.
...Personally, the way I look at it, they had their chance with Notebook, which they killed and broke a lot of hearts.
-app103
Yes. I take a very pragmatic view of software and services. If it's useful/reliable, then it's great, but if it's not useful/reliable, then it is to be avoided. The only thing that I found tolerable about Google killing off Notebook was that Notebook was too kludgy to be of any real use to me, so it was a relatively minor annoyance for me when Google killed it, though I did resent the fact that I had invested quite a bit of my own time into
experimental use of the product - was time that I would definitely
not have invested had I suspected that it was just some kind of a punt product by Google and that they did not intend to support/develop it.
Having become both weary and wary of Google, from the Notebook and other product killings, my perspective of Buzz and WAVE was that they they seemed to be BS from the start and destined to be abortive attempts to invent a
Thneed, and their specific usefulness was in any event limited from the start - so their demise was probably to be expected, and I was not bothered by them being killed off by Google. By that time I had become too cautious to invest them with my time. Incidentally, my perspective of Google's
g+ is much the same and I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
In the case of
Google Reader however, I
did invest it with my time and the decision to kill the product has seriously discombobulated me. GR was the second most useful product to me after Gmail - in which I have also invested a lot of my time. Furthermore, I had recommended to clients that both services be regarded as sound and useful for business purposes.
That's all changed now, of course, following the killing-off of Google Reader. By its own actions, Google has effectively nailed its true and new colours to the mast for us all to see. I would never recommend Google products/services to a friend or a client without a serious
caveat emptor from hereon.
As I said above regarding Evernote:
The lesson in this is that, from a marketing perspective, this sort of word-of-mouth negative publicity is one of the worst things that any product vendor might wish to create, but create it they did. It's not like it is a new lesson to learn, either.
The Google
Keep product - if it ever materialises, by whatever name and in whatever form - thus probably has the potential to be dead in the water at the outset, due to Google's inexplicable and seemingly wrong-footed marketing strategy. This could also have an adverse run-on effect to other, new/test products from Google.
Trust is an incredibly important factor in marketing, and Google corp. would seem to have blown it. Various similar examples (e.g., including Evernote and Microsoft) are indicative of the truth that this sort of breach of trust can take a l-o-n-g time to repair.
