It is mind boggling to me that both Google and Yahoo have thrown away their finance sites. It's utter garbage. And on the phone, Google Finance is even worse. They don't even use the same site or the same behavior, even though I'm pointing to the same URL. It's insane. Why would they completely disregard finance? Are they really not able to make a profitable site using ads?
What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it?
Seems like an opportunity for someone else, if it was really being relied on that much.
I suspect it wasn't. The author of the article said he hadn't checked in six years. Six years! And he's complaining that Google threw his work away.
I think Google, Facebook, and especially Yahoo did significant damage to their reputations and brands through how they have disposed of products both for consumers and developers. It is really hard to take anything they put out seriously until that product has been around a long time and is clearly being supported, used, and polished.
Google and Facebook are still large, strong, and growing, but what Yahoo did to all of the companies it acquired really fucked both their investors and customers. One wonders if Google and Facebook will wander down that path when their growth stalls out.
Even before Google Finance was shut down, I've wanted to work on this. Given that Google Finance has largely faded, I think we have an opening for https://bravos.co to enter the market.
Uh, this isn't that weird... If google enters a market and kills off all the competition then lowers their investment into their tool and the usability slowly degrades then they're basically just Walmarting that market space.
What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it?
Both. They expanded into an area and killed the competition then killed their product and left a void. See Google Reader for the life cycle.
Yes, exactly. Those are not contradictory. If anything, it makes it more obvious why unchecked Big Tech expansion into every market, subsidized by their core monopolies, is a bad thing for consumers in the long run.
There has to be a name for this. Folks love saying "people complained when I did X, now people complain when I do Y." As if that proves something. Unless it is the same people, irrelevant.
(Not that it is automatically relevant if it is the same people. But I get frustrated with this general game of moral equivalence somehow being a valid talking point.)
It is curious to me how people seem to accept certain narrative fallacies like 1) the complainers are the same; 2) if the complainers are the same, there are only two exclusive options in existence that must be chosen.
I work in an org with a lot of regulations and a rent seeking IT group different than development. I’ve heard a lot of people rationalizing decisions using emotion (eg, “they complain if we do, they complain if we don’t [;therefore their experience isn’t important to addres]”
It’s tough to solve and is based, I think, on having your measurement of success be a good story, because objective metrics are not really applicable.
In google’s case they make so much revenue and profit from search the rest of the company just kind of bounces around and doesn’t matter. So projects are run, it seems, off who has a great story. Sure, there’s massive data analysis showing things but those don’t matter. Why did a jillion people using finance used to matter, but not now.
They didn't. No idea where the parent is coming from on that. It still functions much the same as it has for the last 15 years and still provides real-time quotes, proper financials, news, press releases, charts, etc.
I meant it's a shadow of its former self from 5 years ago. It was consistently the best and most useful finance site, over Google Finance, and now the articles are terrible. The news feed for a company used to be great, but somehow it has been turned into something terrible and useless.
Through Google Spreadsheet you have access to many of the same underlying functions for finance, like quotes, financials etc. I have always kept portfolio tracking through the spreadsheet, which in addition offers more powerful functionalities when it comes to numerical computations.
I know you mentioned below that you don't like their current news feed, but for what it's worth, Yahoo Finance is going the opposite direction of Google, upgrading and adding features and integrations, not removing stuff. For example, apropos of the article, Y!Fi not only has the same watchlist functionality that everyone is angry Google removed, but you can now link your live brokerage account for real-time portfolio tracking across their apps/site. If you reach out to them with constructive feedback they are pretty receptive.
(Full disclosure: I work for https://trade.it which provides the aforementioned broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance)
Being a perl/regex person back in the day, I recall having Mastering Regular Expressions as a well thumbed reference book. The author, Jeffrey Friedl ( http://regex.info/blog/jfriedl-links/about ) worked at Yahoo! Finance at the time. It was a most impressive and useful site in its time.
