>Google is a company, with a responsibility (a legal one) to protect the interests of it's shareholders.
I seriously doubt the shareholders were going to be pissed off at Google if Reader were continued. And interests of shareholders is not a black and white thing, for example CostCo pays and treats their workers better than Walmart does. They don't have a legal responsibility to reduce all possible expenses for the sake of profits. The executive leadership has considerable leverage in running a company.
>When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.
That doesn't make much sense. Google has $48 billion cash on hand and made $2.1 billion in net income in just the last quarter. The big companies run a lot of things that are not directly profitable but give them goodwill and a halo effect of staying in the ecosystem.
On the first point, yes, this is a frequent misunderstanding of the law. The management of a company has a general fiduciary duty to shareholders, but does not have any kind of narrow legal obligation to maximize profits, certainly not over any specific timeframe. They have quite large leeway to make decisions on the basis of whatever strategy they think is correct, and they may value things such as "customer loyalty" and "brand perceptions" in whatever way they see fit. If Google's management decided, for example, that it was important for their reputation that they stand behind their products long-term, and therefore that nothing would be shut down except in extraordinary circumstances, there'd be no legal problem with adopting that policy, even if it lost money short/medium-term. That's simply a strategic decision, which might be wise or unwise, but which courts have no authority to second-guess. Shareholders could vote out the board if they disagree with it, but there would be no violation of fiduciary duty.
I am not suggesting the the law is black and white. Nor am I saying that there is anything codified as law that would require Google to do anything so specific as moth ball reader. The decision to mothball reader (rightly or wrongly) was clearly a business decision: Google obviously felt it could better serve its user-base as a whole (and by extension its shareholders) by distributing its time and LOCs in other ways. The reason I brought up the law was in support of the general point that Google has every right to distribute its finite time and resources with this tenet in mind.
If they chose to keep Reader going it would be purely on the basis that its niche user base is somewhat influential, and might have some success on the future success of their products. That is not in service of it's wider user bases' interest.
So where does it stop? If Google continued to support Reader as a niche product with no scale, no monetisation and a dropping user base should it not continue to support other applications as well ? Should Buzz and Wave et al not still be alive and well ? Little pebbles ... and all that.
The reason I say you cannot have your cake and eat it to is that NO company, NO matter its size or success, can perpetually continue to experiment at the rate Google does if they intended to support every product they made forever.
I seriously doubt the shareholders were going to be pissed off at Google if Reader were continued. And interests of shareholders is not a black and white thing, for example CostCo pays and treats their workers better than Walmart does. They don't have a legal responsibility to reduce all possible expenses for the sake of profits. The executive leadership has considerable leverage in running a company.
>When operating for profit on finite resources you can NEVER EVER EVER have your cake and eat it too.
That doesn't make much sense. Google has $48 billion cash on hand and made $2.1 billion in net income in just the last quarter. The big companies run a lot of things that are not directly profitable but give them goodwill and a halo effect of staying in the ecosystem.