I understand it, I just don't buy it. Reader was a great opportunity to apply machine learning. When left neglected to a couple of days, my feed reader becomes a huge pain to sift through. There's a lot of room for innovation in this space, a la Inbox.

I'm not accusing Google of anything, but their treatment of Atom/RSS can be likened to Microsoft's old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish strategy. I honestly believe that in some ways it's worse off now than it would've been had Google not got involved. Killing Reader was at worst malicious and at best irresponsible.