Not at all. They could have actually put effort into it. The problem was that they didn't maintain it. They let it languish, staying exactly the same for years, good enough that nobody wanted to compete with a free product but not actually doing anything to improve the RSS ecosystem, so pretty much nothing happened with RSS for years besides it just existing. And then they decided to just shut down Google Reader with a relatively short time frame, because they never figured out how to monetize it.
They had 3 perfectly good options:
1. Don't build Google Reader in the first place if they weren't interested in actually maintaining the damn thing.
2. Put some effort into it, keep improving Google Reader, make the whole RSS ecosystem better rather than causing it to stagnate.
3. Sunset Google Reader over a much longer period of time, like a year instead of the 3.5 months they gave. Those 3.5 months were just barely enough time for people to build replacement services.
>The problem was that they didn't maintain it. They let it languish, staying exactly the same for years ...
That's what maintenance is though. Keeping something functional, but not developing it further.
>... because they never figured out how to monetize it.
That's not true. They shut down Reader because the codebase was dated, and there were few engineers left on that team. It was a reallocation of resources.
>Sunset Google Reader over a much longer period of time, like a year instead of the 3.5 months they gave.
They had 3 perfectly good options:
1. Don't build Google Reader in the first place if they weren't interested in actually maintaining the damn thing.
2. Put some effort into it, keep improving Google Reader, make the whole RSS ecosystem better rather than causing it to stagnate.
3. Sunset Google Reader over a much longer period of time, like a year instead of the 3.5 months they gave. Those 3.5 months were just barely enough time for people to build replacement services.