Perhaps this is a good thing. Google has gotten too big and to many people rely on it in various ways. If Google cannibalizes itself then noone will need to bother killing it.
Google are getting very good at this whole shutting down of something which doesn't quite make the usage levels that they want even though it might be very popular. Surely this burning of the end user will get old to consumers at some point and they will go elsewhere.
I can't help but think that if Google is successful, the entire endeavor will end up like Reader: Google wipes out the competition, decides that they no longer want to run the service, end it, and there is no-one left to fill the void.
The future is certainly Google as a frontpage for basically everything, from search to maps to shopping to whatever is thing still independent from Google today. That's inevitable if Google is allowed to continue like that. Google needs to be broken up.
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