"any such dead-end, non-revenue-producing product that’s retained is holding others back, and prevents the company from moving forward and making true innovations instead of incremental improvements."

WTF?

I can just imagine the shareholders meetings... "We've had to put the self-driving car project on hold - Google Reader is just eating up too many resources, and dammit, we just can't afford to innovate with all the hundreds of engineers continually improving Google Reader with new features and functionality. And Maps? Forget ever seeing new functionality there - all our brainpower is trapped up in Reader (and Google Voice, and Wave, and...)".

I don't buy it for a second. What 'true innovations' have they been held back from by having Reader and similar services around?