XMPP gtalk was awesome, and killing it was foolish; my _entire_ gtalk contact list suddenly stopped appearing, and that didn't just include people in IT. Dancers, musicians, teachers, et al were using Adium/Pidgin to chat, and suddenly it didn't work.
The web chat they provided was incredibly slow on mid and low end PCs, but most of my friends didn't even get as far as trying it. Google talk stopped working in Adium and _they didn't notice_ because they were able to talk via other connected services.
Probably for the best, Google didn't end up the benevolent technocratic force for good that we hoped for at the time.
Well something broke it at some point where it no longer worked. There's plenty of threads going back years over years where folks are befuddled about connectivity issues.
And there's that Android users were coerced to use Hangouts, which did not have XMPP. Rather than switch to Hangouts, most of my friends kept using Whatsapp and Messenger.
Hangouts - no. It never was as smooth as skype or google talk.