Google Reader was useful right up until Google killed it.
That is what makes the shutdown worth remembering.
Reader did one ordinary job extremely well: it collected updates from RSS feeds and let people follow many websites from one place. It did not need to become a social network, a video platform, or an advertising empire to be useful.
Google’s reason was not that RSS stopped working
Google launched Reader in 2005. In March 2013, the company announced that it would retire the service on July 1.
The explanation was short. Google said Reader had a loyal following, but usage had declined. The company also said it was concentrating its energy on fewer products.
See Google’s 2013 spring-cleaning announcement.
Users were given time to export subscriptions and other data through Google Takeout. RSS itself survived. Competing readers existed and more appeared after the shutdown.
So this was not a case where the underlying technology became impossible to operate.
It was a portfolio decision.
Useful to whom?
A product can fail one corporate test while passing the user’s test every morning.
For the person following hundreds of blogs, research sites, newspapers, or niche forums, Reader could save substantial time. For Google, a service with declining usage competed internally for engineering attention with products capable of reaching vastly larger audiences or producing more strategic value.
Both statements can be true at once:
Reader was useful.
Reader was not useful enough to Google.
That distinction gets lost whenever a shutdown is treated as proof that nobody wanted the product.
Corporate scale changes the definition of success
A small independent company may consider a stable service with a dedicated paying audience perfectly healthy.
A giant platform company may evaluate the same audience against opportunities measured in hundreds of millions or billions of users.
That creates a strange risk for customers. A product can be popular enough to become part of their routine and still be too small to survive inside the company that owns it.
The relevant question before depending on a free or subsidized service is therefore not only is this good?
It is also what would make this worth continuing for the operator?
Those are different questions. Google Reader answered the first one for years.