Also, Google literally has hundreds if not thousands of products, but everyone just loves going back to the one decade old example of Reader being shut down. Also Reader was nothing special; there were dozens of other just as capable RSS readers before and many more since.
Reader is a convenient example of a product with a large following that met a simple need. Google is notorious for product and feature churn; being one of their paying customers is exceptionally frustrating as you're basically at the mercy of the Product Management's whims when it comes to features in the product. (Either having them added or removed) No one is denying that other products have a similar issue, but with many other products, you have the option to not update or to stick to a version that meets your needs. With Google, there is no choice.
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Similarly, with their free-in-exchange-for-data products, you can't really count on anything being around that long because it's entirely built in Google's world. Any other standalone product, it works even if the company goes belly-up.
Whether or not there are alternatives is kind of irrelevant -- not all alternatives are built equally, not all are cross-compatible for some functionality, migrating out of a product is not always simple, nor is migrating into a product.
Google burns good-will with every product they off; the numerous iterations of chat application is a perfect and current example of this, as I don't doubt that there's probably already a new Google chat product in the works in some department that will be pushed out to Android shortly.
I'm not so sure it had a large following (do you really think it had as many users as say, G-Mail?). However, it is clear that it had a very _vocal_ following, and many of the people who used Reader were people who used it to follow developments in the tech world (e.g., bloggers and journalists), and hence, had a very loud megaphone to complain when it went away.
There were also a large number of other RSS web readers; some web based, some app based, some desktop based. The claim the lack of interest in RSS today is due to Google Reader's withdrawl just isn't backed up by the facts. In fact, I think the cause and the effect are mixed up here. I'm pretty sure that if RSS had managed to achieve mass market appeal, Google Reader would have very likely stuck around.
How many of the "large following" of Google Reader were paying customers? As far as I can tell, the answer is basically zero.
And that's the problem: Google has no idea how valuable its various apps and services are to their actual users, because the actual users are not the ones paying for them.
To reiterate, don't focus too much on Reader. It's just a convenient example. If you've never been a Google Business or Apps for Education Customer, it's very hard to explain the awkward position you're put in.
No Support
Everything is rolling update, regardless of how it affects your workflow or organization
Regardless of whether you use it or not, changes happen (addition/removal)
Google is incredibly frustrating to do business with as a paying customer, much less as a non-paying customer. However, their influence over the web at the moment is too strong. Gmail and spam filters are a perfect example; saying you can just host your own mail server is ignorant, willfully or otherwise, and your only safe bets are Google or Microsoft. There are workarounds, sure, but that assumes such workarounds will continue to work.
Google is a very capricious company to deal with as a customer, paying or otherwise. It's not about valuing apps, it's that Google has for some time maintained an attitude of "we're google, where else are you gonna go?", and the problem is that there is some truth to this. That's what the article is complaining about, that's what I'm complaining about. Market forces really don't enter into it at Google's size and scope. Others are just as guilty (Amazon, Microsoft), but right now we're talking about Google.
> Google is incredibly frustrating to do business with as a paying customer, much less as a non-paying customer.
Agreed, and that just makes the problem even worse: Google isn't even getting important information on the value of its apps and services from users that are paying them, let alone from users that aren't.
> Market forces really don't enter into it at Google's size and scope.
I don't think this is true. Google is responding to market forces, just in the wrong market. Instead of responding to market forces from their users (even including paying users, as you say), it is responding to market forces from advertisers. Google simply does not appear to see their business model as providing apps and services to people; that's just a side effect. They appear to see their business model as harvesting revenue from ads. And that business model is a really sucky one for all of us in the long term.
