Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in “free” Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do. And if more and more of the people who would be Google’s early adopters feel as I do, and as Fallows does, then that could become a problem for Google.

How much would I be willing to pay per year to use Google Reader? Probably more than the value created by me not clicking on ads.

Is that not what this comes down to? Because Google can't think of a way to make money from this product, it dies. Or is it because they just want to "focus"*.

If I could be a pro user, and pay for the service, and Google could actually monetize their product like a traditional company I would love that. Use all my apps, have a supported back-end. To me, RSS is the plumbing of the internet, I expect to pay to maintain that system.