> Reader was perfect the way it was and could have been left unmaintained.

Google products like Reader tend to use internal APIs for storage, authentication, request routing, deployment, logging, builds/tests, etc. It can be a lot of work just to keep up with those internal changes.

It was actually worse than that - Google+ used Reader as a backend. A lot of the stream-merging and ingestion features of Google+ were built on top of the Reader codebase. That meant that when Google+ product needs changed and they needed to alter the backend, they couldn't really do so without branching & disentangling or shutting down the external-facing Reader product. The latter was a much easier course for a time-constrained engineering organization, particularly since Reader as a project had been de-staffed and the engineers (that didn't leave the company) transferred to the Google+ org.

FANG interns aren't coffee-runners; you can't give them work you wouldn't give to a real junior engineer. First: doing so undermines your efforts to recruit the intern. Second: doing so undermines your efforts to evaluate the intern. Third: doing so wastes a valuable eng resource you could deploy on something worth launching!

The real problem for Reader was that it wasn't worth any engineering effort (because it only had a couple of million daily active users).

If I were an intern at Google and it was my job to maintain Reader I would be ecstatic. Hell, I'd happily do it now as a senior engineer. Why would I rather do a bunch of bullshit on a product nobody cares about when I can work on something I know people deeply love? Can you think of something that would have a larger impact than maintaining Reader?

This mentality is entirely the reason why large corporations can never do anything apart from their core business, and why they always spend billions acquiring startups (which usually fail to integrate into their business). They just fundamentally are incapable of creating anything new, and when they somehow do it the incentives are so misaligned they shut it down and the only thing they get for their efforts is making the public rightfully hate them.

I used Google Reader and Google Notebook. Since they discontinued both, I avoid committing to any new Google products - I don't want to rely on a company I consider unreliable. I even stopped using Firebase after they were acquired by Google. I wonder if they have any metric for that - can they measure how much business they lose because of the trust damage?