There seems to be a lot of misplaced anger towards Google for deciding to cancel Reader. I say misplaced because if you think about it there isn’t any reason to be angry about it; here is why:

Reader isn’t an irreplaceable service, there are many other RSS readers out there, I just learned about some of the new ones in the last week, that I never knew existed. Some of them are much better than Google Reader. As a matter of fact, besides Google Search, I can’t think of a single proprietary Google service I use that can’t be replaced, if Google decides to close them tomorrow.

Google gave you plenty of time to move your data off of Reader to another service. It takes less than a minute to download or move your data to another RSS Reader.

I am happy that indirectly Google is pushing me away from one of their services, I have been trying to be less dependent on Google for some time, and this is a perfect excuse (albeit forced) to move out of their ecosystem. By diversifying my online footprint and self-hosting some of the services, I am being less dependent on one company.

No company can guarantee you forever support for any single product. We don’t know if 10 years from now there will be anything called “Google Search” or anything even remotely comparable to how Search works right now. Even paid and wildly popular services like Dropbox can close down tomorrow (however unlikely). Being a paid service doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will last longer.