I disagree, Google Hangouts was a failure from the start. Former Google Talk supported XMMP, including federation, which meant you could connect with multiple

I disagree, Google Hangouts was a failure from the start. Former Google Talk supported XMMP, including federation, which meant you could connect with multiple clients and talk with people talk with people that don't have Google accounts. With Hangouts politics took over. They eventually told people the line about XMMP not evolving fast enough for their needs. But I remember their leadership complaining about their competition not playing nice. So when Hangouts happened I saw absolutely no reason to use it. There were plenty of alternatives on the market already, at work we were all using Skype. And at that time I was working with former Googlers that preferred Google's shit. You might give me the line about the general population not caring, bla, bla, but Google is in the habit of betraying their power users and early adopters. They did it with Google Reader. They did it with Inbox. And I was actually glad to see Hangouts fail. It might have been a good implementation of yet another chat app, but few people cared.