Interesting connection you made there. Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" was about moving away from proprietary tech towards open web standards. What Google is doing with RSS is the complete opposite.
The fact that the alternative to Flash was an open standard was a convenient convergence of interests. Jobs disliked Flash and wanted to hasten obsoleting it.
I have no inside information, but from reading the proverbial tea leaves and following his career, I think Sundar Pichai might have a similar prerogative and management style with respect to shedding things that are "un-Googley" Particularly things that run locally & sync with their services, e.g. Google Gears, Goolge Desktop, now CalDAV, etc.
Everyone (including Google) wants their own proprietary tech to be what's used, but no one (including Apple) wants to work with the constraints of other people's lousy properietary tech. If Apple owned Flash, they wouldn't have wanted to move away from it, and if Google didn't own Google+ they would probably be pushing RSS as an open alternative.
