It's unbelievable because it's not true. They're dropping XMPP federation, which outlook.com never used anyway.
What outlook.com has done is they've added an XMPP client that lets you connect to Google's servers in order to send chat messages to GTalk users. That's still going to work.
Also note that what Microsoft have done is allow outlook.com users to communicate with GTalk users, but not the other way around.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-reinstates-federate...
> Your users may use any chat client that supports XMPP. XMPP clients will continue to work as usual with the App Engine XMPP service.
> Note that the changes discussed above have no impact on non-Google XMPP clients
Why this utter confusion over a simple thing after a whole three hour keynote yesterday and today no one seems to have a clue? Communication fail, if you ask me.
Color me skeptical, but there was similar confusion when SMS search stopped working suddenly,and then people realized Google killed it. XMPP support may stay, but I am not going to bet more than 2 bucks on it.