This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.

Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.

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antibios an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.

	▲	dekhn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).

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blondin 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.