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The Days of Google Talk Are Over (techcrunch.com)
The days of Google Talk are quickly coming to an end. An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: As the company announced today, the messaging service that allowed Gmail users to talk to each other since it launched in 2005, will now be completely retired. Even while Google pushed Hangouts as its consumer messaging service (before Allo, Duo, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet) over the last few years, it still allowed die-hard Gtalk users (and there are plenty of them) to stick to their preferred chat app. Over the next few days, these users will get an "invite" to move to Hangouts. After June 26, that switch will be mandatory.
Why would they tell those users to move to Hangouts, when they've already started telling hangouts users to move to Allo, Duo, and Messages?
Google seriously needs to stop this. The way to improve a product isn't to scrap it and build a new one every 6 months, but to upgrade the existing one. People get used to your existing product and want to keep using it. worse yet, people on your old product can't talk to people on your new product, and right now you have at least 3 generations of incompatible product in operation!
Yes. No. Maybe. Who knows. It doesn't matter. Whatever the answer is today, tomorrow may bring a completely different answer. It's Google, where everything's in beta until it's randomly announced it will soon be shut down with no reason why.