Previously… Google took over the world of RSS – an idea that lets websites send their news stories to you instead of you traipsing to them – and when the competition had gone, and all around was peaceful, they dropped it. The same week they dropped this Google Reader service I relied on, they announced a new one called Google Keep: nothing to do with Reader or RSS, it was an Evernote clone that was promoted as the great way to keep all your information for ever.

Or until Google switches it off.

I’m not bitter.

This week, Google’s Jon Wiley did a Reddit Ask Me Anything and the topic of Google dropping features came up. He said:

One thing that’s almost always guaranteed with product design: when you add a feature, no one complains about it outright; if they don’t love it they mostly just ignore it. Whereas if you take something away, you’ll hear about it if people relied upon it… loudly and often. With something like Google Search, even if just a small fraction of people miss a feature and an even smaller fraction says so, that can still be tens of thousands of people. It can seem like a tidal wave of opposition to the removal: “look at all these people who want it back!”

So it would be much easier to leave in everything that’s ever launched. But then you end up with bloatware: an unwieldy array of ill-fitting modules that don’t work well with newer technologies (e.g., the shift to smartphones, or upgraded security, or touchscreens, etc.) and don’t really serve most of your users well either. And nothing comes for free – every feature must be maintained, supported in multiple languages, on multiple devices, and the additional complexity must be accounted for in testing so that the entire service remains reliable. And that cost gets balanced against the impact: is this feature solving an important problem for lots of people?

There are many, many such features that you always have to make tough choices about. We’ve actually cut features that I love. This is one of the toughest but most important parts of designing products – deciding what to trim as you move forward. Sometimes you over-trim – we work to measure the impact and aim to strike the right balance. Sometimes we get it wrong, so it is important that people speak up. We really do listen, and we prioritize according to what seems to satisfy the widest needs given our capabilities.

Google’s Jon Wiley on Ask Me Anything, Reddit.com (24 July 2014)

Makes sense to me. Now, explain why Google didn’t just get rid of a feature, it got rid of an entire service.