[lolinder]

Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put together by a team that really cared about it, but always had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot of their key people before it imploded:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.

[nostrademons]

Three greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of having Google product strategy set by executives who were accountable to the CEO/CFO rather than users/customers, vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture change is the root of the issues we're talking about in this thread.