Google had really great products, that almost everyone I knew used, then they scrapped them for new shiny thing that competed. The one that angers me most is Google Talk, it used to work with any XMPP client, until it did not, and now its long since dead. They made their own version of tinychat (hangouts) and then mostly killed that too.
Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some of the gems:
I think if they make a product, they should support it long-term (within reason of course). Hangouts was great, for example. It could do SMS, voice and video calls, and regular web-based text chat. It was everything you need from a messaging client, all in one app. It was so close to being a real iMessage/FaceTime competitor, but instead they killed it and launched Allo/Duo instead, which was an incredibly baffling decision.
Sure it could've used a bit of a facelift and some other tweaks, but they have a history of launching new, half-baked products instead of just maintaining the existing ones.
I think GTalk being spun off into its own thing might have seen Google Talk succeed beyond whatever Hangouts became. Google Talk had a native client plus it had native clients that supported its protocol.
I even messaged from my GTalk to my Facebook as a test, which worked because both were Jabber. Both companies closed both services off to anyone else. Sadly.
Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some of the gems:
https://killedbygoogle.com/