No, not the same. Some of my least technical friends use imap without knowing they're using imap. Ask them about Jabber and their response would be "What??" which is why it got axed.
Killing imap would cause 60-year-olds I know to complain at the same time that we would complain. You can't have that broad spectrum complaint. As much fuss as there was over whatever that RSS thing was, I signed up and used it for 6 months and then forgot it existed.
In short: Let's put to bed the idea that Google is arbitrary, they're not. If they look at the numbers and see people not really using the product, they take it out back and put a hollow point through its head. (This is also why I'm bullish about Google Plus...they would have killed it otherwise.)
Ignorant considering we have no idea how Google plans to make its money in the future or even now. The older services that were created to make people think it was really cool, just create problems for Google because they were made using open protocols that don't conform to Google's new lock-in strategy. Non of this is "spring cleaning" or "just running the numbers" kind of stuff. Its more like herding cattle based on some strategy that involves location data, driver-less cars, robot/machine learning, all its users data and god only knows what else in order to do god knows what.
"Some of my least technical friends use imap without knowing they're using imap. Ask them about Jabber and their response would be "What??" which is why it got axed."
Ask them about IMAP and their response would be "What??". Your point doesn't support itself.
Sorry, no that wasn't clear now that I look at it.
I tried to type out another paragraph but it was equally as bad. Here is another shot at what I'm trying to get at: They're not the same because I'm willing to bet there are orders of magnitude more users using imap than there were technical people who used and cared about Jabber. Even as a technical person, I hadn't realized Google had removed it and I'm someone who previously used it. And I'm in the small group, not the general public, but I know several people off the top of my head that aren't technical and myself that use imap on a daily basis.
Jabber support, in the sense of any client being able to connect to google talk, is perfectly active, hell I've got it open on my desktop right now.
Federation, the ability for having your own jabber network contactable by google talk users and vice-versa, that was (partially) turned off, after a string of spam abuses.
They actually temporarily broke Jabber support and then put it back on when people freaked out. I have noticed though that when I have hangouts conversations they don't seem to make it to my Jabber client...
