<i>"It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people."</i><p>Yes, but it wasn't in Google's commercial interest. Running Reader as a "side project" is not just distracting to senior management, but also creates legal, technical, and reputation risks which can bite back on their much larger businesses.<p>It's hard for most of us to comprehend, but ready-made revenues of a few million bucks, even if it was $100M (unlikely), is not of interest to Google unless it's growing fast. Which RSS, isn't.<p>Welcome to Extremistan. Black Swans like Google do things that aren't intuitive.<p><i>"The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability"</i><p>Yes. This is indeed the direction Google has been moving, and it's a problem for those of us who enjoyed an open web, as users <i>and</i> developers.<p>Google tried to combat Facebook with open standards and it didn't work. OpenSocial, if anyone remembers, was a huge effort by Google which would have the effect of commoditising Facebook's functionality. They put themselves on the line by partnering with many other companies, and it failed to slow Facebook down.<p>They tried with other standards too, e.g. PubSubHubbub, WebFinger. Most people have never heard of them.<p>There's no conspiracy theory needed here. Google tried with Reader too, for 8 years. It just didn't take off. Most people found it too hard and found Facebook + Twitter way easier. Not the kind of people who read HN, but the kind of people who are too busy to figure out what seem like trivial technologies to early adopter types.<p>So yes, Marco is absolutely correct that Google's becoming a company that, like Facebook, is more interested in bringing developers in <i>after</i> their products have gained traction with users. This is also how Apple has acquired so much interest from developers; they didn't open source their OS, they didn't spend years constructing open standards for mobile apps. They just built a hugely popular OS and developers came running.<p>All of this is <i>related to</i> Google Reader, all of this is true. BUT there's no causation here, as much as some people want to believe it. Reader didn't take off because most people didn't use it. For a giant company focused on growth, that's all the reason you need to turn it off.