[happymellon]

There are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number.

Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.

[blitzar]

Google talk worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Hangouts which worked less great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo.

The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.