Got an email yesterday from a reporter at BusinessWeek, wanting to know, if Google couldn't make RSS work, why are so many others interested. I decided to talk to the reporter, on the record, despite my rule of not doing interviews.

The answer is simple. RSS is the way news is distributed on the Internet. That's why so many people want to be #1 in this area. News is big business. And starting in the mid-90s news has been on the Internet, and it's not going away just because Google is getting out.

I think Google made a huge mistake with RSS, and that's why the others are rushing in to try to be the new king of news on the net. Their excuse, imho, is as silly as it would be if they cancelled GMail because people are texting more. Google killed Reader because they're a big ouija board with internal politics, just like every other big company. They made a mistake. The mistake was getting into RSS in the first place, when they didn't have a love of news. They were rudderless. No sense of direction. The fairest thing they could do with RSS is what they did, get out. I often wonder why people take jobs as CEOs of companies that make things they have no passion for. Same idea. Google did not love RSS. So they shouldn't have tried to own it. Once that dawned on them, the only rational answer was to transition out.

In the coming competition the winner, imho, will be the ones who love news with all their heart, and have a clear intuitive way to answer this question when they have to -- What would news do?

A better question (which I asked the reporter): Why isn't Bloomberg launching a net-based news-for-everyone service to fill the void left by Google?