Google doesn't seem to realize that one of their most valuable assets is trust. And that trust has eroded a great deal in recent months.
They have a product where they can't make money and can't fit it into their corporate direction. Good companies eventually cancel projects like this. Yes, we had a great product for free for a long time. Now it's time for someone else to fill the vacuum.
If you don't even understand that, that's why you can't be trusted.
Bottom line is if there is a real market for something and someone makes a better product.
Google killed Reader and trust.
“‘There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,’ he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/
Had there been interest, revenues were easy to find: a college student trying their first project would at least have slapped some Google text ads on there. Given Google's other projects, they could have just made Reader a service with a $5/year charge, bundled it with Google Drive subscriptions, etc. The Google+ integration was a hopeless botch full of obvious opportunities to make both services more valuable but they simply did not try and succeeded only in making a strong, active, influential community use their services less and distrust their executives‘ vision and competency.
http://pinterest.com/googlegraveyard/google-graveyard/
People say they would buy things, all the time.
That's a factually incorrect statement. I'm sorry, but people who make factual claims are supposed to care when they're proven wrong.