Brian Shih was the Google Reader Product Manager for about three years before leaving Google in 2011. He explained why he thinks Google Reader was shut down based on his experience working with the team for about three years. He makes it clear that he doesn’t know the reason but he is speculating based on his long time spent with the team.

Why was Google Reader killed? Because the engineers who worked on Google Reader understood social and sharing better than anyone else. He said, within Google Reader, sharing was easy, fluid and very popular. That was until Google removed most of the sharing features when Google+ came around.

Brian said that most likely the Google Reader engineers did not want to leave the team to work on new things but rather they were forced to. He said it happened at least three times in his tenture there.

2008 – let’s pull the team off to build OpenSocial
2009 – let’s pull the team off to build Buzz
2010 – let’s pull the team off to build Google+

He said:

Okay, so now I know it wasn’t all my fault. 😉

Forum discussion at Quora.