The shutdown of Google Reader is mainly due to technical reasons, The infrastructure changes too much, and the code cannot be updated continuously 。 The SRE team is mainly responsible for the closure, but the implementation time may be delayed.
All subscription data will be sent to the Feeds team in Zurich for archiving. After the closure decision, there were problems in internal communication, and the blog posts that were finally announced to be closed were released in advance, but did not achieve the desired effect.
The closing time is mainly technical. Enough changes have taken place in the infrastructure, causing the Reader's code base to be corrupted and unable to be pushed to the production environment. It sounds like there has been no push for about 6 months. I'm pretty sure I pushed it shortly before I left (October 2012), so it's a bit surprising that the code decayed so quickly.
The closure is mainly the responsibility of the SRE team (Alan will actually take a vacation two weeks before July 1). In fact, it sounds that they will cancel the GFE rule on July 1, and then take the time to shut down any server, because this actually involves understanding the working principle of things and their dependencies. The FRBE team will certainly run for a longer period of time because other Google services depend on them.
All subscription data will be handed over to the Feeds team in Zurich (they also inherit the PubSubHubbub center, and maybe even the AJAX Feed API). They will want to archive it. Matt Cutts has always been part of a conspiracy to try to deal with closing work as reasonably as possible.
He said politics didn't really work. If it is a political factor, the simplest way is to do nothing and keep the service running. Wipeout (the Reader does not meet the requirements, and the data of the deleted Gaia account still exists) is a minor factor, but if this is the only reason, it will be easier for it to continue running.
Once the closure decision has been made, they need to write someone's name on the blog post (Google Blog, Reader Blog). Alan said that he would like his name to appear on Reader Blog because he is the last engineer. However, it is meaningless for this name (as a random engineer) to appear on the Google Blog article announcing the shutdown of several services. It is more reasonable to have a vice president, or at least a supervisor. PR asked several directors and vice presidents (including Alan Noble, Sydney site director), who all pushed aside, saying that they would see (external) people in the next few weeks. If their names appeared in blog posts, they would be criticized for closing Reader. The PR later asked Alan, who refused after consideration. The PR thanked him for considering the problem carefully, then went to Alan's manager and asked him to go to Alan. Alan refused again. PR asked his manager to ask him again. Alan said that he would agree only when they promoted him to supervisor, which was the last news he heard. At last Urs said that he would like to put his name on it. Alan's opinion of Urs seems quite good; Among all the vice presidents, he seems to be the one who is most willing to talk about Reader sincerely.
PR also gave Alan a file to send to reader discussions @ and internal Google+. Obviously the document was bad, but at least he was allowed to rewrite it. Generally speaking, PR seems to be very involved in internal communication; Alan seems rather cynical about this.
The blog post announced its closure a day earlier. The idea is to take advantage of the announcement of the new pope and the opportunity of Andy Rubin being replaced, so that Reader's news may be flooded. PR apparently didn't realize that the people who cared about the other two events (especially the Pope) were not the people who cared about Reader, so it didn't work.
This also messed up the internal announcement plan. The original idea was to announce the management restructuring on Tuesday, hold a general meeting on Wednesday morning to discuss, and then announce the closure of Reader on Wednesday afternoon, leaving TGIF (now Thursday) as the place for discussion. Since everything happened on Tuesday, the general meeting was finally dominated by the problem of Reader. The discussion continued on TGIF until Sergey held up a microphone cable and said, "If I bite, will the pain stop?" Urs was the only vice president who had a reasonable answer to Reader's question (especially Matt Cutts had been defending Reader for a long time). About a month later, they held a "Take Parents to Work Day", where they held a special TGIF in Shoreline Amphitheatre. Obviously, parents were encouraged to ask questions. The first parent mentioned the closure of Reader, which caused laughter from all Google employees.
This article is reproduced from Fried Eggs , Translator: BALI
Original English: persistent
