Oh please.
I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a variety of alternatives to Reader in any case.
I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.
Google deal with Firefox was always about being the default search engine there, and that's it. They never had any power of cutting it adding features to the project.
It'll live on in the history of the internet ... foreverrrrrrrrrrr.