[magicalist]

That's not similar in spirit to "embrace, extend, and extinguish", and not even a good description of what they've done. There's no migration path from Reader to G+ (presuming that's what you mean by "the closed system"). There's not even a clear correspondence between the content in each, and meanwhile Google does provide a migration path to other RSS readers.

I think there is a clear argument for Google consolidating around APIs and their social network instead of federated protocols in the future. However, the whole "strategy to kill off RSS" thing is silly and undermines the other arguments you're making.

The bittorrent and gopher comments were facetious. It's not at all clear that all browsers should have a button that appears when a page has an RSS feed and, when pressed, opens a different web page to then enter the address of that RSS feed into your reader. Zawinski's Law was not meant as praise.

The lack of that RSS button is no more evidence of trying to kill RSS than the lack of gopher support is evidence of Google's plot to make sure that Gopher will never rise again like a phoenix and supplant the World Wide Web once and for all. Instead, you make sure extensions are able to build that button for those that want it (or put an option to enable it in about:config) and you call it a day.