I want to applaud Google's general philosophy of "try stuff, shut it down if it doesn't work" but I do wonder if this isn't bad for the brand. They've been pretty "ruthless" when it comes to shutting down things that some people still use (or at least that's the image).

I think in the back of their minds, possibly subconsciously, people like me probably make decisions against other technology they provide even if it is in a completely different category and pretty much never going to shut down.

For example, I'm not sure I haven't decided against their cloud services because my subconscious remembered the reader being shut down and thought "they better not shut down some part of the infrastructure I rely on".