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.