14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just introduced Keep, a note-taking tool built into Drive. At first glance, it looks like a solid product, it works fine on mobile, has all the basic features you'd need and so on.
But perhaps the timing of the release wasn't so great since the discussion quickly turned to Reader and its demise.
Why start using a note-keeping service from Google when it may get pulled a couple of years down the line if it's not as popular as the company wants, is the question everyone seems to be asking.
Normally, this would seem like an overreaction, Google has been killing off unpopular products for years, the reaction is bigger with Reader since the people who use are also mostly the people who write on the web.
And Google is hardly the only one killing off smaller projects, Microsoft has become an expert at this in recent years. But killing off Reader has made a lot of people not trust Google.
And there is precedence, not Reader, but Google Notebook and Google Bookmark Lists were two similar products from Google which, obviously, are no longer with us.
They're not exactly like Keep, but they are fairly similar. Both enabled users to save web pages for later and add comments or notes to them. In fact, Notebook was much more powerful than Keep while offering many of the core features.
Google decided twice that people didn't want a note-taking app and killed off the products forcing users to grab their notes while they still could. What's to stop Google from deciding for a third time that Keep isn't something people are interested in?
Obviously, Google is not going to launch something that it's going to kill a few months later. And the company is very invested in Drive, which has the potential of becoming a big business, or at least a business for Google. But three years, five years, seven years down the line, a lot of things can happen.