> You realise there were feed services that went kaput because of Reader

People keep saying something like this without providing real examples. I can believe Reader's existence might have depressed the market for new feed readers (though there have long been competitors around--lots of open source and built in ones, and a few for-pay ones too, like Feedly), but I haven't been able to personally think of any feed readers that were crushed by Reader coming out.

I may just have forgotten them, though (2005 was a long time ago). Anyone have good examples?

>>I may just have forgotten them, though (2005 was a long time ago).

Yeah, good point :-)

There was Bloglines. It is still there, only difference being - it's a ghost town now.

There used to be FeedDemon's own sync and now FeedDemon is jumping into the pyre with Reader.

It's been long and I am out of example. Maybe others will bring some.

But thing in this way - "because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products."[1]

Thing this way - what about an startup that wants to enter hosted mail(web mail too) and they won't because of GMail. The same can be said about IM(for personal use; not those dev chat apps), Forum(Groups?), blah. And Google has good reason to kill them too.

[1]http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/03/19/this-is-what-pisses-me...

The same could be said when they started Google - at the time Altavista was dominant in search. If you're that easily dissuaded, you shouldn't be in startups. There's almost always an existing solution to the problem you're trying to solve.

Altavista wasn't an arm of one of the most powerful, valuable, and influential companies on earth.

No, but at the time, the Internet was also about 1/100th of what it is today and Altavista was still worth about $3bn. It's hard to picture now, but back in 1999 Altavista and Yahoo were towering giants online.

AV was spawned by researchers from DEC in 1995 a full 3 years before Google came on the scene. I'd say Google was the severe underdog at the time.

Bloglines killed themselves when they tried to redesign into a Digg competitor instead of a feed reader.

What is "sth"? Services? Software?

Probably short for "something". See definition #1 here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth

its a terrible shorthand for "something". I always read it as "sith".

I am from India and so I grew up on British English and have stuck to that. I was gifted a Oxford Pocket Dictionary when I was a kid, by an uncle. I practically learned my English with that dictionary, had it till recently when I passed it down to my niece(who is in 5th grade as of now).

Now, you'll have to trust me on these two statements:

1. I did learn "sth 'can' be used for something" from that old good little dictionary[1] and did not pick it from the Internet or SMS and it's a valid use. (Though, I see it also means South in US Eng)

2. That is probably the best dictionary I've come across, even better than OALD, I had them both and hardly ever used the latter (:-) ).

[1]http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/sth?q=sth - not Oxford link but just as good.

Same here in China. I grew up learning English using mostly British textbooks and sth is introduced to us quite early, pretty much like xyz in algebra. I'm actually quite surprised to find out it's perhaps not that common in the US.

In my experience you'd be hard pressed to find 'sth' used in the US (same for sb), most people would type it out to avoid ambiguity with 'south' and other words. In SMS and other short formats, phonetic spellings like 'sumthin' are more common.

I've only ever seen South abbreviated as S, never as sth.

I grew up in England learning English. sth is not very common here either.

Thanks for the explanation. I grew up in the USA, and covered a fair bit of British literature in school, but I've never encountered this usage before.

It's "something".