Google is an advertising company. They make their money in advertising.
If they can’t sell ads against a product, then it’s not important to them. If the product doesn’t collect data to better target their ads, then it’s not important to them.
Google+ is important.
Gmail is important.
Android is important.
Maps is important.
These all tell Google who you communicate with, what you talk about, what you’re interested in, where you go and how you get there.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is about what other people have to say. The feeds you read are not you. They are what you like but not targeted enough to sell ads against.
RSS is not important. Especially when Google Reader became the default backbone for RSS syncing among applications. Google can’t serve ads to those applications syncing to Google Reader. Google can only serve ads on its own pages. And if no one is looking at those pages, no one is seeing those ads.
Look for more emphasis on Google+. That’s an area like Gmail where Google can serve ads and collect data to serve better ads. That is how they make their money.