While the constant churn of young free products doesn’t usually do much harm, proprietary monocultures are extremely vulnerable to outcomes that suck for everyone. And a proprietary monoculture that’s unprofitable, shrinking in popularity, or strategically inconvenient for its owner is far worse.

Interesting post that touches on some quirks of the tech economy, spurred by Google Reader's demise.

And we lucked out with Reader — imagine how much worse it would be if website owners weren’t publishing open RSS feeds for anyone to fetch and process, but were instead posting each item to a proprietary Google API. We’d have almost no chance of building a successful alternative.

That’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (Does the shutdown make more sense now?)