I can certainly imagine that making you want to stop listening to his podcast and stop reading his blog, but it is surprising that it would be the reason you switched to a competing software product. Are Instapaper and Readability otherwise so similar that the merits of the apps themselves didn't tip the balance?
I think it's quite a good reason - for example, I try to avoid flying Ryanair because I find the guy who runs it objectionable. If I don't like the person providing the product, putting money in their pocket feels wrong.
Sure but the biggest claim I could make from listening to BnA is that marco is kind of a dick. I'm sure that a good 30% of the software I used is written by someone who is kind of a dick. He's not Pol Pot.
I avoid them because my knees hurt when I sit in their planes. For example I'm not too interested in Bill Gates or Steve Jobs either, but if Bill Gates was the nicest guy ever and Steve Jobs was the biggest objectionable a*e ever, I'd still prefer the OSX to Windows.
Comparing the two, they have the exact same functionality that I care about and Readability has a Chrome extension which is a lot better in the Instapaper bookmarklet to me.
Instapaper does have a collection of previous articles that I still want to read which makes the scales basically even but Marco's arrogance and his...I don't know if sense of entitlement is the right description but regardless I don't have the urge to suport him just because he is the "little guy".
For iOS user's I think Readability and Instapaper are interchangeable but the big difference will be Readability's Android support. Marco is on record saying he will never have an Android version because he never wants to hire anyone. He always wants Instapaper to be a one man operation.
In the end competition is good. Hopefully Readability will bring some new ideas to the table and if Marco has the capacity to either keep up with them or innovate in other ways then these "save to read later" tools will just get better.
