Well, maybe my understanding of "whimsical" is wrong but it do not feel the same way to me. "Alyssa P. Hacker" is a poor pun that do not try to look clever.
> My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it
What about the universe where someone decides that keeping the goodwill of the (yes small, but as we've seen in the past week very vocal) Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode?
> Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode
What makes you think it is a minuscule cost? Crawling the millions of feeds and updating the XML parsers as feed formats change is going to cost very real dollars.
A better solution would have been for Google to auction off the service. This would have allowed smaller companies to run it and impose a small fee. While it might not have made sense financially for Google to do this, it might make sense for a small company with a small staff focusing just on this product to make a go of it.
It's a supply and demand thing. Very few people grow up wanting to make web apps, but many many people grow up wanting to make games, and when they have that chance, willing to take a pay cut to do it.
I would go even farther than you. It's not science reportin because it's a report by two law professors, working for the Wharton School of Economics. One of them, Klick, regularly writes for the Cato Institute on privatization, Austrian school economics, and so forth. It initially sounds like a scientific report, but one just has to consider the source.
