I miss Reader (though I'm amused that it let Feedly take off, and they're a Cloud customer!).
One thing often not considered ("Why not just have someone keep it running?") is that you really have to keep a team of people on it (in case there's a CVE or something) or at least familiar enough with the code to fix it. There's also the double standard of "you haven't added new features in forever!" (Maybe this wouldn't have applied to Reader though).
But, I agree if we could have kept it on life support somehow, we wouldn't have (as many) people asking "What if they shut down Cloud?!?". Conveniently, as people get a sense of how serious Google Cloud is about this business, even on HN I'm seeing this less.
One thing often not considered ("Why not just have someone keep it running?") is that you really have to keep a team of people on it (in case there's a CVE or something) or at least familiar enough with the code to fix it. There's also the double standard of "you haven't added new features in forever!" (Maybe this wouldn't have applied to Reader though).
But, I agree if we could have kept it on life support somehow, we wouldn't have (as many) people asking "What if they shut down Cloud?!?". Conveniently, as people get a sense of how serious Google Cloud is about this business, even on HN I'm seeing this less.