They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
Your apologia is begs the question of whether Google could make money or find a fit for it when they never even allowed the team to try:
“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.
no, you seized control of an open RSS ecosystem with Reader and Feedburner, made those a platform no one could compete with, and then pulled the plug on the ecosystem.
If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
My comparison is simply that someone built a solid product and gave it away. Yes, people still pay hundreds of dollars for the same software when Open/Libre Office will work for most people.
The difference is that Google gave away access to the product, while Open Office and The GIMP gave away the product. If Open Office dies (like it almost did in the LibreOffice fiasco), you can grab its source code, recompile it, and keep on working. When Reader dies, you have nothing.
They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.