> You can no longer communicate with Google users with the XMPP client of your choice. They require you to use only their client.

That's not quite true.

Google Talk is still available, and you can use that in place of Hangouts, and you can use third-party clients with it.

However, you cannot use third-party clients for group chats, and you cannot speak to users on other XMPP servers (there is no true federation).

I can still chat with Google users via Adium. I suppose if they're not using XMPP they're doing something else, but if Adium supports it, it's probably in libpurple, which means Pidgin and other OSS clients can do it too.

Then why change it? Why the treadmill?

Why send the rest of the ecosystem scurrying about, chasing their tails?

And if the ecosystem gets the rug abruptly pulled out from under it one time, then how many more times will their efforts get trashed? Probably as many times as is necessary to shake them loose.

No announcements, no roadmap, no communication channel, just a sudden upgrade and everything starts timing out, or throwing errors.

Someone threw the killswitch. And they'll toggle it as often as needed, to cut out whatever the target percentage of attrition is.

Which ecosystem? There hasn't been a large, open XMPP ecosystem for quite a while...