[BeetleB]

> Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing

There may not have been profit driven companies competing and that detail is mostly irrelevant. There was no shortage of alternatives like software running on your computer and self hosting options.

RSS wasn't designed to help companies make money. The demise of Google's competitors is irrelevant to the long term health of RSS. It was thriving before such companies tried to make money off of it.

People who didn't use Google Reader were not at all impacted by its demise. The RSS experience remained the same. It's silly to claim Google played a role in killing it.

[glenstein]

Google Reader was the predominant offering, and they integrated RSS into practically everything. The RSS ecosystem had Google as its center of gravity due to Google's strategy of embracing it. Shutting it down did a unique damage that only Google would be capable of doing. There are indeed desktop alternatives, but I guess the critical question is whether you believe losing any one of them would have an equivalent impact on RSS that losing Google Reader did. I think the main point at stake is that Google had a disproportionate role, and so it's perfectly true that RSS lives on and I'm grateful for that, but I don't think any other software, or company, or website, has had such a disproportionate role both in elevating and in rolling back RSS.