I love the way some of the tech pundits have gone on and on about Google Reader - take Om Malik:

I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.

So.... remind me again - exactly how much did you pay for that service you devoted 7 years to? Nothing, right? You knew all along that it was going to live so long as it met Google's ad driven revenue model, right?

Companies don't push out products out of the goodness of their hearts. These things cost money to run, and that money comes from one of two places - ad revenue, or license revenue. We know that Google doesn't make money via licensing (at least not for their web facing products) - so that leaves ads. If a service isn't good at ad conversions, then it's not something Google can maintain. For the mountains of ink spilled by people like Malik, this apparently simple fact is... just beyond their grasp.

Tags: google reader