14 DAY TRIAL // Google Reader is dead and it's going to stay that way. There's been much said about Google decision and the reasoning about it, the consensus seems to be that Google simply doesn't care about a product with a few million users.
But there's another angle, All Things D has some unnamed sources pointing at the complexities of ensuring a product follows privacy guidelines, something Google is a lot more keen on in the wake of the Street View WiFi fiasco, as the main culprit.
Google Reader has been going on autopilot for the past few years. It makes sense too, it's not a product that requires any maintenance and Google wasn't actively developing it.
Apparently, there wasn't even one software engineer working full time on Reader. If privacy wasn't a concern, this may have been fine.
Google wasn't making any money with Reader, but it wasn't losing too many either, especially since no one was working on it.
For Google, as with most other tech company, the most valuable resource is the scarcest, people.
Google can afford to spend a few hundreds of thousands of dollars or a few millions per year for the infrastructure needed by a niche product.
But it can't afford to keep even one employee working on something Google doesn't really care about.
Google needed to make sure Reader complied with its policies, especially in the privacy department, and that would have meant people dedicated to it.
It's unclear why Google couldn't simply do a privacy audit, implement any changes or fixes as needed and then move on, especially since Reader wasn't getting any new features.
That said, this issue probably had a lot to do with Google's decision to kill off the social features in Reader a couple of years ago. This still isn't much of an explanation for Google Reader's demise, but it's the best we've got so far.
Selling Google Reader wasn't an option either, it's too dependent on Google's infrastructure to make it possible to outsource it to an outside company, it would be easier to just build something new from scratch.