That does not really follow, nor is it a good point. A product offered by a company can be a huge part of the web, and if RSS and Google Reader were equivalent it still could've been popular. One can dispute both, saying that it was only known in a small circle even back then, but none of those points speaks to that.
> That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.
I'd rather see it as a lesson on how long developers remember if they feel betrayed by a company. Google Reader + Google Plus real name policy + its integration into Youtube was like a perfect storm to undermine Google's popularity, and then came Snowden. But it began with Google Reader, and I think that is why people remember.
PS: Given who the author is I think no one can fault him to give in his reasoning much importance to RSS.
> That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.
I'd rather see it as a lesson on how long developers remember if they feel betrayed by a company. Google Reader + Google Plus real name policy + its integration into Youtube was like a perfect storm to undermine Google's popularity, and then came Snowden. But it began with Google Reader, and I think that is why people remember.
PS: Given who the author is I think no one can fault him to give in his reasoning much importance to RSS.