One could argue Reader organized information as well.

Reader lets you organize information, not Google for you.

Better kill Calendar then. Can't have us mortals organizing our own schedules.

And Google Drive better get rid of folders. Just have a box you drop files on. If you need them back, hopefully you can figure out a search term to find them. But not using any search operators, those are too much like letting you organize.

Does one mission statement really cover the motivations of a company that has branched out into so many areas? Reader is a huge blow to that mission.

Isn't that why they're consolidating and trimming the business, to be more focused on that mission statement?

In itself, Reader could fit in (as the article by one of the original developers touched on). But for various reasons they never worked this out, or didn't put enough resources on it. So now they pull the plug. A stupid decision for many reasons, but not necessarily from a purely 'strategic' point of view.

One reason I can think of that they never invested deeply in Reader could be that the subset of people using it actively (geeks, information addicts) just wasn't interesting and broad enough to them.

Or perhaps there wasn't a large enough subset of that subset who work at Google. They don't have a use for it internally so there's no way they can dogfood it.

Google's corporate mission is to sell advertising.

Google's mission seems to have changed. Looks like their focus is now more towards organizing "Personal information" than "World Information".