There were other things that google could have done, but I agree not enabling RSS was a poor decision on Google's part.
To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.
So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.
I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.
Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.
To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.
So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.
I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.
Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.