According to AllThingsD, it could be.

But the shutdown wasn’t just a matter of company culture and bigger priorities, sources said. Google is also trying to better orient itself so that it stops getting into trouble with repeated missteps around compliance issues, particularly privacy.

That means every team needs to have people dedicated to dealing with these compliance and privacy issues — lawyers, policy experts, etc. Google didn’t even have a product manager or full-time engineer responsible for Reader when it was killed, so the company didn’t want to add in the additional infrastructure and staff, the sources said.

I’m personally using the death of Google Reader to do some much needed culling of the sites I follow and the posts I’ve saved. I still need to find a new option. I installed the Feedly app this morning and immediately disliked it. It wouldn’t mark my items as read completely and it doesn’t seem to have imported all my Reader saved items. Bummer.