It seems to me that it didn't need much in the way of support. I have been using it for several years and have never experienced so much as a glitch. That could be down to excellent support, of course, but to me it seemed a mature product that could have been left to run exactly as is for any length of time and nobody would have complained.

I just don't see why they couldn't have just left it running as-is, without any support.

I don't disagree, but that seems to get into the gray area where we don't have enough information. Some of the other Google discontinuations were attributed to bandwidth usage in excess of any possible revenue mechanism. (I'm not aware of whether or not that was debunked, either?) Was that the case here? No idea. It seems plausible that Reader uses more bandwidth than Translate would.

Differently, Reader does not seem like the kind of app that would inspire a lot of uniquely hard engineering problems. (I.e., any hard engineering problems would probably be shared by several other Google services.) That seems to suggest that far fewer engineers would be attracted to working on it exclusively, and any that did wouldn't have any significant investment in Reader as a product.

There are valid reasons to discontinue even a mature product with a reasonable amount of success, populist or monetary. I dislike that Google declined to share those (though I sympathize with the managing principle of "just do it; don't explain why"), but I doubt I'd run any company the way Google is run in the first place, so my opinion on that front isn't really useful.