I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset about this, at least not like this guy. I wasn’t actually using Google Talk, but of all the chat clients I’ve evaluated, it was one of the best. Recently I’ve been using Skype for chat, and it works reasonably well. Everyone already runs it, which helps.

But I’m still surprised that Google snuck this one past me. I only discovered it when I allowed Secunia’s PSI (software that checks for missing updates) to update Google Talk. PSI claimed there was a newer version than the one I was running, so I told it to download and install the update. When it was finally finished, I was running Google Talk version zero: it had been removed completely from my computer. So I started looking into it, and discovered that Google eliminated Talk some time in May 2013. Google will tell you that what replaced it (Google+ Hangouts) is much better, but that’s complete crap.

Google has got to be hurting itself by eliminating all these services. Most serious professionals (including me) are now wary of using any free service offered by Google.