Shutting down Reader really did an oversized amount of damage to Google's reputation. I always found it surprising that Google wouldn't devote the engineering resources just to maintain Reader and not upset the influential people who relied upon it.

No one is more influential than Google.

- Google

Indeed... I don't even consider using their development tools now.

Just the other day I met a guy who told me he wouldn't consider learning and using Go because Google will cancel it eventually

What a reputation issue they're developing. Even if their tech is pretty good, there's a growing number of people who won't even consider it (myself included)

Very reasonable concern. I like Go, but it's not sufficiently better than its competitors (Java/C#) to be professionally maintained or adopted. Then there's the huge chunk of people who use it just because of the Google halo effect. My guess, Go and its ecosystem would end up floundering like other ex-corporate languages like Object Pascal or Objective-C. Even more so if Google abandons Go because they made a brand new replacement.

That doesn't really make sense, though. Go is entirely open source. If Google dropped it tomorrow there are more than enough non-Google people invested in it to continue development.

Maybe, but how many of them are compiler engineers? Go does not strike me as a language, that a compiler engineer would love.

Eh, if google cancelled go, there's a good chance a bunch of go compiler engineers would move to other companies using go...

It would continue development, but how popular would it remain without Google blessing?