I've been moving away from Google services for some time now and definitely not regretting that decision today: there is another program to add to the list of dead chat programs by major companies and one of a remarkably long list of dead Google projects (gcemetery.co): Google Hangouts is going away (ghacks.net), migrated into yet another (AndroidAuthority.com) Google chat service.
Related:
* Yahoo Messenger gone: viewtopic.php?t=22999
* Google Code going away: viewtopic.php?t=21977
Google Hangouts going away
Re: Google Hangouts going away
Hahahah! It was predictably
Re: Google Hangouts going away
I was looking for something suggesting that Google's constant project shutdown was hurting it's brand, but this might be more interesting: the average Google project life is 4 years.
Re: Google Hangouts going away
This might be informative, too:
The Google Cemetery, a list of dead Google products and why they died