Highly useful software is not always profitable. Limiting our species to developing technologies that are profitable rather than merely useful is a severe blow to our path of innovation.
I sympathize with your sentiment but if you dig a little deeper you are asking Google and its shareholders to suffer a loss because you find something useful but do not want to pay of it. At its core this is a selfish argument. I am sure many users would be willing to pay Google a small amount to keep Google Reader alive but the problem is Google being a super large corp can not run the product with that much money. The same users can actually pay half that money to a company in India to build an equivalent product and get much superior and customer focused product than Google could build.
Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful? It seems the opposite, that people would pay for things that are highly useful. People don't pay for things that are marginally useful.
> Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful?
Typically because they can easily get it for free. Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually bought a license for software they used daily?
I think you're missing a case here -- if they remove it, and they can get along without it without much trouble, I'd argue it isn't highly useful. Just because it has frequent use doesn't mean it's highly useful.
