People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.

Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn’t push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.

Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn’t work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.