>>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.