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Google has lots of pointless products that don't make any money, it's not why reader was killed.

• joelrunyon 12y ago
  What was the reason then?
  • judk 12y ago
    The G+ juggernaut rolled over it. Same reason photos went to hell for a few years until G bought a few startups and started over.
  • greatzebu 12y ago
    It never attracted a giant user base. I miss Reader (especially the pre-G+ integration version) and I wish it was still around, but it's not mysterious why it got killed. If it had hundreds of millions of users it wouldn't have died.
    • tomkarlo 12y ago
      This: Google's scale of operation doesn't work well for a free service with a small number of users - the legal, localization and support overhead is disproportionately expensive on a very small service, unless it's a paid one.
  • vacri 12y ago
    It apparently had only 10k users. 10k users that loved it, but still not really enough for google to allocate resources to support and develop it.
    • quesera 12y ago
      That's astonishing. Do you have a reference for that number?
      • vacri 12y ago
        No - it was a number being thrown around here on HN when Reader got the chop.