You've never heard of it because MChurch is the only one that uses it. It is something he made up to explain the fact that he came to Google and people didn't recognize his "genius", despite his many high-profile attempts to explain to everyone what we were doing wrong.
Michael had a bad time, for reasons that most people believe were due to his own impatience, and now he likes to talk about Google as if his situation is the norm. It's not.
No one minds if Michael talks about his own bad experiences at Google. People just get upset when he pretends his experience is representative of Google as a whole.
My experiences may not be representative. My observations are. I've met countless people who've been screwed over by its anachronistic closed-allocation regime.
Some people have good experiences, some don't, and for 95+ percent of the "don't" category, it's because Google screws the pooch when it comes to people management.
I've never met a Googler who (a) got smacked by its antiquated HR system, and (b) actually deserved it. There probably is one or two out there-- it's a Poisson distribution with parameter around 2.5-- but I've never met one. Most of Google's problem employees (I've been personally attacked by a few) seem to do just fine.
Reader was based on a very old Google platform that was no longer viable. Porting Reader to the new infrastructure essencially meant rebuilding the entire thing as a new project. The amount of work does not even compare to an April Fools hack by the Maps team.
Can we please stop using everything that Google does as an excuse to complain about Reader?
