You could also argue that Google tried to reinvent Skype, Slack, Discord, and a million other chat apps, and they cannibalized their own offerings because they were feckless and mercurial.

Yeah, and also cuz they kinda sucked. 1st-gen iMessage, or even old-school Trillian, was loads better than Google's graveyard of shitty chat products.

Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs of money and different teams at reinventing different spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a whole.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site here.

Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats.

"Evolve" here meant removing compatibility with xmpp clients AND losing all chat history.

Chat history matter a lot, really.

I can still see all of my Talk/Hangouts/Chat history going back years. Removing XMPP sucks, and I was annoyed by that too, but the chat history is still there.

The grizzled IRC veterans. We are finally free of the deluge of clueless plebs.