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You're being downvoted, but I'd actually agree. My guess is this idea originated from the Chrome team in an effort to improve the browsing experience.

Google rarely makes unilateral decisions from the top down to product teams. They mostly operate independently.

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Google rarely makes unilateral decisions from the top down to product teams.

Apart from shutting them down.

To be fair, relying on product teams to shut themselves down, in case they've hit a dead-end, probably wouldn't work.

Actually, why not? It's not like the employees get fired. You generally know when you're working on a crappy product.

Google Reader was a fantastically useful product for me. Not "crappy" at all.

That's the point parent is making: the Reader team probably wouldn't have opted for shutting down, and they would have been right.

The reader team didn't exist (and hadn't for years) at the time the decision was made to shut it down.

That's true, but every Googler knows how much of their pay check and RSUs come from ad revenue.

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