[zekevermillion]

Google Talk was better. I used that for business purposes, but once they migrated everyone to hangouts the quality -- latency, sound, etc, dropped a lot, at least as experienced by me.

I have to agree with you it must be internal politics. Otherwise why would they keep inflincting harm on themselves? But maybe they have some data that suggests this is a good idea...

[int_19h]

For starters, Google Talk had an actual client app (and then of course you could just use any XMPP client). Hangouts is a Chrome web app, which in practice means that it doesn't really behave like a proper app at all - e.g. on Windows, if you pin it to the taskbar, then close the window, and click on the taskbar icon, it'll open Chrome extensions page, not the app itself.

[StavrosK]

I still use the XMPP client, though, it never stopped working.

[danellis]

Really? I get excellent quality from Hangouts. HD video with enough clarity to make out individual hairs on a cat.

[pathseeker]

Yeah, I get lagging and voice/video sync issues. Trying having a conversation with a person instead of a cat to experience it. :)

[eigenvector]

I find Hangouts handles low bandwidth and/or high latency a lot worse than FaceTime.