This does suggest that they really did shut down Reader in order to push people to use Google+. This suggests that somebody at Google is a fucking idiot, becaus

This does suggest that they really did shut down Reader in order to push people to use Google+. This suggests that somebody at Google is a fucking idiot, because Google+ is in no way a substitute for Reader. Google+ (like Facebook or Twitter) gives me a stream of stuff that's happened recently - it's ephemeral, in that if I don't make a conscious effort to bookmark something I see there, I'll forget it. An RSS reader, on the other hand, remembers (and categorizes) everything unless I make a conscious choice to mark it as forgettable.