This week, Microsoft announced that users of its popular online email website Outlook.com would no longer be able to enjoy integration with Google Talk. In making the announcement, the software giant placed the blame squarely on Google for deprecating support for Outlook. Truth be told, Microsoft has a point. On February 17, Google informed it users that Google Talk would deprecate native support for Outlook as of the 23rd. At the same time, Google stated that third party applications having hooks into Outlook.com would continue to work. Nevertheless, Microsoft said that Google’s abandonment of support for the extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP) necessitated the move to no longer support Google’s messaging service.
Google will itself translate away users of Google Talk to Hangouts – an app that runs inside of the Chrome browser.
Microsoft also dropped support for Facebook Messenger at the same time. Messenger continues to support the XMPP protocol. Currently, half a billion people user Facebook Messenger. What is clear is that Microsoft is encouraging Outlook.com users to adopt Skype, which they own, as an alternative to Google Talk and Messenger. Microsoft expressed their confidence that users will find Skype to be an excellent alternative. Skype has been growing briskly since Microsoft purchased it 3.5 years ago for 8.5B USD.
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