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A comment on Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors. Parent comment

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by UncleMeat on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @06:45PM (#19792745)
> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.

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Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by firebones on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @10:02PM (#19793896)
Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).

Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).

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Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by nostrademons on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:16PM (#19792971)
Exactly. I don't think Google is making the wrong choice, given their size and prominence. I do think that making the right choice means that they inevitably lose their ability to innovate, and hence miss out on the next technology choice.
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