The author is reaching here. Us nerds need to remember the web isn't just for us, at least not for B2C businesses. Google isn't doing this to squash competing technologies and take over the web... on purpose. What's going on is that only nerds like us give a damn about RSS. Everyone else wants to just point and click around and have stuff work. Google+ and some pointing and clicking around = a lot of happy normal people. Seriously, meta tags? Again, who's gonna do that except me and everyone else in this thread? Techie folks like us tend to really overestimate our importance and how many of us there are. There's a lot but we're nothing compared non-technical folks.
Google isn't for us. It's for your parents. But that's alright because there's a whole world wide web out there without Google and Google really can't do much to actually kill any technology. RSS exists guys, there's just no Google Reader anymore. The cool thing is that if you actually care about this stuff then you're probably in a position to know how to build it. Google caters to those who don't know or care to build stuff. Why would you blame a company for catering to its customers?
Google isn't for us. It's for your parents. But that's alright because there's a whole world wide web out there without Google and Google really can't do much to actually kill any technology. RSS exists guys, there's just no Google Reader anymore. The cool thing is that if you actually care about this stuff then you're probably in a position to know how to build it. Google caters to those who don't know or care to build stuff. Why would you blame a company for catering to its customers?