[oth3r]

He doesn't do a very good job arguing his point which is basically "Google moves forward rather than maintaining the status quo, so they can't afford to turn into a big bureaucracy with aging products."

Google has lots of products that no one's using, why take one away that many people depend on every day? The reason Google's getting rid of Reader is pretty simple, they don't want their own products for consuming and sharing information competing against each other, namely Google+.

[svachalek]

Based on the title this is what I was expecting to read. RSS doesn't steal much/any of Facebook's market but its usage among the niche crowd that uses G+ is significantly higher.

[Someone]

Here's my view on this:

I have been using Google Reader for ages, through FeeddlerRSS on my iOS device. For most of that time, I haven't thought for even a second "that's nice of Google, providing this sync service for free". I haven't seem a Google logo or ad, either. In fact, even now that I have been checking whether I actually use Google Reader, it took me quite an effort to find that out.

Given that, why would Google keep that service running for me?

[mgkimsal]

Because people have come to rely on it. And no one is suggesting that they run it for free - they could easily charge a few bucks per year, cover their administrative overhead, and keep their foot in this space, while a) not losing money, and b) not losing trust from people who may want to adopt other google tech in the future.

I've still got gmail as an email which I use a lot, but would be extremely hesitant to ever trust them with anything else (I've also got other email I manage on my own). When the sands shift in a few years and gmail doesn't make sense for them any more, they may easily just shut it down, or severely limit it.

Google Business stuff? Would not use it. Google Checkout? I use it, and their tools have not developed at all in the past few years. Google Voice? They have to be losing money on the phone numbers, and I will not be surprised one bit if they shut it off in the next couple years. And people will whine/complain about that too, but the writing's been on the wall for a while - don't trust businesses that you don't pay money to (and don't trust a business to be around just because you pay them either, but it's a start).