Taken from http://www.google.com/landing/now/
> Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.
Google Now extends the mission to include personal information. The plan is to eventually know what you want before you know you want it.
How could that be any more strategic?
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.
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.