No the real reason Google Reader was shut down was because it was competing with Google Plus, their failed social network/Facebook compete. Vic Gundotra was the head of Google Plus product and was not shy or hiding that Google Reader had to go--at the time Reader had its own social features like the ability to subscribe to your friend's starred RSS feeds/stories and share them, comment on them, etc. It was purely a calculated move to kill Reader so people had to use Google Plus for sharing stories and commenting on them. This would goose the number of active Google Plus users and ensure Vic hit his targets for getting fat bonus payments.
This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).
The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.
Google is extremely bad at increasing the scope of existing projects. Like, rather than kill Google Reader to support Google+, maybe they should have merged Google Reader into Google+ and evolved it as the onramp to convince people that Google+ was awesome. Only, no: the people who work at Google fundamentally don't seem to understand product design, and so they consistently introduce a new unrelated project (or multiple at the same time) and deprecate, kill, and finally delete the old one (which will experience the same fate), often with no transition or migration plan for end users :/.
This absolutely was not a case of "the product was finished and did all it needed to do"... people were pissed at what was happening and didn't want to move over to Google Plus (which completely lacked the core feature of reading RSS feeds, despite Gundotra claiming they would eventually implement it (shocker! they never did)).
The story of Google Reader's demise is purely a power grab by a mad exec/product leader that ran his product to failure and eventually was forced out of the company under allegations of being a sex pest to employees. Google Reader died for no good reason other than getting that piece of garbage some bonuses.