There were and definitely appeared the readers with pretty much equivalent functionality and some were even copying the look and feel straight up. But the main

There were and definitely appeared the readers with pretty much equivalent functionality and some were even copying the look and feel straight up. But the main advantage of the reader was that it had almost all the past posts from the feed archived, for the vast number of sites. No company other than Google wanted to pull this off. Another aspect is that people felt Google signaled to the site owners that they do not have to pursue feed support as actively if at all.