[listmaking]

Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.)

This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

[freedomben]

Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

[deely3]

But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.

[tehlike]

Agree with this take.

People always assume some ulterior motive to every single decision google does, but things are often much simpler than that, and mostly all it comes to prioritization...

[brandensilva]

I hear ya but who sets the priorities? Management typically right? So if they don't see value in RSS and move their KPIs it will never be implemented.

And well profit motives push managements decisions so it's no wonder it never got prioritized. Nothing nefarious about it. RSS makes Google no money.

[jimmySixDOF]

Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.