Google Reader died because of lack of interest from Larry Page: Report

Google Reader may be dead and gone,but the finger-pointing and blame-game still seems to be on. Even while the Google leadership has moved past Reader as a closed chapter, the loyal user base has not. Reports have now emerged that Google Reader was given the boot because it wasn’t “top priority” for Larry Page.

A Buzzfeed report has suggested that the death of Google Reader was not lack of interest shown by the readership but because Google’s CEO Larry Page and his closest circle of executives did not think of the RSS Reader as an important strategic priority. Sources close to Google have claimed that internally it had begun to be understood that despite the fact that Google Reader had a significant user base, working on the project was not going to garner any attention from Page.

Reader, who?

The RSS Reader was shown the door by Google in its spring-cleaning session that usually spells doom for the company’s lesser-used products. The addition of Google Reader came as a surprise to many, since it is one product from Google that has had a loyal user base since the beginning. The company had blamed the declining number of users, a theory that was panned by critics, for the closure.

Google Reader began as a side project by former employee Chris Wetherell while he was still working with the Internet giant. It quickly manifested into a path-breaking way of employing RSS feeds and became the most widely used one. Wetherell, in retrospect, mentioned earlier this month that if he were to found Reader in current Google, he would’ve simply taken the idea and left. He said he wouldn’t want to put the product at the mercy of Google’s leadership.

The report also mentions that the leadership and engineers within Google were more focused on Page’s larger projects like Android, Chrome, Google Plus, and Search. And the prevalent notion was that if this meant letting go of projects with a loyal niche audience like Reader, then so be it.