That depends on whether there's a critical mass of Googlers dedicated to the product who want to see it through to success, not only initially, but in 10-20 years. You'd think that Reader wouldn't take much effort to keep going, but no one was interested.
This is not accurate. There were tons of people who would have willingly developed it but Vic Gundotra did not tolerate products that had social aspects and were not part of Google+, so he had it murdered.
