Let’s take care of the disclaimers right off. First, Richard MacManus is smarter than I am. He has also consulted for us in the past on this very topic. With that out of the way, I’ll get on to my contention…
Read/WriteWeb published a shocking (to me) revelation last week: consumer RSS Readers are a dead market now.
The catalyst for the post was the early retreat of Pluck’s RSS Reader. MacManus forecasts that “consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless.” In all fairness, he goes on to point out that the business interest remains in white label and enterprise solutions, but I still don’t agree with the first part, not even a little.
Microsoft is integrating RSS into Outlook next year. Google and Yahoo! are both planning important integrations into Gmail and My Yahoo! / Yahoo! Mail respectively. But, so what? Who’s to say that these three entities have the exclusive line on how to implement the perfect RSS reading device?
So, after a week of believing Richard, I’m ready to get back to my earlier belief: consumer RSS readers suck, but they don’t have to. I, for one, think it’s going to be someone other than Microsoft, Google or Yahoo! that’s going to prove it.
