I think it'll still work, right? Google Voice is still supported.

I think this relates to apps that utilise gtalk. Obihai is integrated with gVoice.

Is there something I'm missing?

>owes me

>solely for free google integration

Dude, you get what you pay for

I doubt they have any coherent strategy in the messaging space.

Well, it is not a big secret on many occasions people tell the outsiders Google would have multiple teams working on the same, if not, similar product, only to find just one will launch publicly, and then 6-24 months later the service will shut down.

If you remember whose Google's customers are--advertisers, not users--coherency is a lot easier to understand.

So it's really easy to predict Google. Just ask the following questions:

- can Google run ads to every user of the product? - can Google extract usage data to build a better user profile, in order to charge more for above ads?

The answer with regard to Talk or any interoperable service, is almost always no to both.

The incoherency we see is related to the fact that not every engineer or manager at Google is fully plugged into the above or sometimes they create a product that fails to answer the above with the hope they'll figure that out later. Sometimes the nature of the product or the fact that it's an open standard makes it impossible to evolve the product to get the questions right.

I loved that I could use my native Mac messaging app to communicate with colleagues in google chat. It was real-time and all messages were logged and available in gmail. I guess that's going away.

I agree. Where is Sundar? Larry? Sergueï?

A googler already summarized their strategy succinctly up-thread [1] as:

Google is a feudally organized collection of fiefdoms and this shows in their product strategy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13951918

The GNU Manifesto[†] has never been more relevant.

[†] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html

Federation is where different service providers can communicate with each other, like how email works. Meaning, you could login to Gmail (whether gmail.com or custom domain) and send messages to users with accounts on non-Gmail IM providers (practically speaking this meant hobbyist, corporate, or university IM server deployments; Google was the only major consumer IM provider to adopt a federated protocol).

The shutdown is unfortunate news because the only way IM is going to be as open as email is if two major consumer providers step up and do it. We had 1 and just needed 1 more. Now we have 0.

Federation means not having to reinvent the chat wheel for the umpteenth time.... Who was that quote from - physicists stand on the shoulder of giants... software and IT stand on each other's toes. Sad but true.

Indeed! Much different leadership back then:

Service choice is something you have with email and, for the most part, with your regular phone service today. [...] Unfortunately, the same is not true with many popular IM and VOIP networks today. [...] The Google Talk network supports open interoperability with hundreds of other communications service providers through a process known as federation.

Google doesn't support the Matrix protocol either, unfortunately

The writing on the wall for this has been up for a long time. Raging for something that has been so predictable is not reasonable, there has been plenty of time to plan for this contingency and act accordingly.