The Guardian UK has a great article on why killing Google Reader is like Killing the bees.
Basically RSS never caught on with the internet in general, and it isn’t an easy source of income, and google would of course rather have us use Google+, though it doesn’t work at all the same way.
The thing is the users of Google Reader are power users, and they still drive much more site traffic than Google+ does. And they are the journalists and power users and bloggers. And it is us that drives people to sites, and drives links on sites like Google+ and Facebook, so Google is effectively shooting themselves in the foot without any forward thinking.
I totally agree with the sentiment. It is the same kind of Hubris as Apple giving up on it’s power users without releasing a new MacPro in years! Power users may not themselves be a huge sales market, but they are in fact a huge driver of others users and the internet in general.
And to drive those users away from your services may not hurt in the short run, but it will hurt in the long run. Who of us will trust Google to keep it’s services around? Will Blogger be next? How about Gmail? Calendar? What service will Google drop next? And the more users that leave, the less money Google makes over advertising, and reading their data, and it will make them more irrelevant!