That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video.

Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others.

They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.

To this day I've yet to use any social media as much as I used sharing Google Reader articles on Google Buzz.

My little circle of friends just caught the thing right at the right time, and we loved it hard!

Oh man, I used to check labs so often. God damn Google became a proper fallen empire of a company 'eh

> Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything

Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.

I would argue that all of those were failures, so there was no reason to keep using them. So I guess the better argument is that at this time Google wasn’t known for cancelling successful products

Reader was a failure in the commercial sense, though. No good path towards monetization, no positive synergy with other products, too much technical debt that nobody wanted to work on.