> and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.'

This is my biggest issue with Google, past the immediate concerns about the Reader shutdown. Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket, regardless of whether it's a good fit for the problem at hand.

Spreading out lead them to create lots of good products that served all sorts of niches - the loudest outcry about Reader has come not from tech nerds, but from journalists of every stripe. Keep eliminating niche products, and soon enough it adds up to a large chunk of your audience, each of which had a different need that Google decided wasn't important enough to serve. There's value in diversity.