Well how about that. I have been sitting on this article about IM (Instant Messengers) for some time. I was thinking “this is interesting, but IM are not cool any more, VoIP is all the rage now what with Skype dominating the market. After which, everyone knows that it is so much easier to just SMS or IM someone than email”
But now, IM is back on the front page of tech news with the release of the long rumoured IM program from Google, simply called Google Talk.
The program is clear, simple and very minimalistic. It does what’s it meant to do efficiently and fast. Doesn’t take up too much of a memory footprint. Makes clear voice calls, integrates smoothly with Gmail and looks good to boot.
So the main question here is not if it’s any good (which it is) but more along the lines of: Why?
Ok. It has good VoIP, most likely to go up against Skype. That’s all well and fine. Next it is an IM and that’s where it starts to get strange. The big players in IM are already all well determined. In fact it’s pretty much dominated by Microsoft’s MSN, which took the crown from the floundering giant ICQ. So Google trying to capture the minds of IM users has a long battle ahead of them.
Most likely the IM side of the program is not the focus. Everything points back to the VoIP side of things. Even Skype has their own built in IM system, so Google follows suit, an extra feature if you will. Google even went as far as to use open source protocols for the IM system, so that creative developers can come up with creative ways to modify the program. Just another reason perhaps to show that it’s not the main issue here.
Last but not least, Google Talk is integrated with Gmail. It even acts as a Gmail new mail received notifier and anyone who you add to the buddy list is sent one of your many Gmail invitations, if they weren’t using Gmail already.
But wouldn’t putting an IM program together with an email service mean that people would be more inclined to use the IM instead of sending an email as the above mentioned article describes? I mean look at Hotmail and MSN, many people signed up for Hotmail simply to use MSN and thus ignored the whole subscription part of the Hotmail service.
Here’s what I think. Google Talk is not a whole new service at all. It is actually in fact an add-on to Gmail itself. Gmail is the key here. Almost everyone is using it now, just from passing of invitations alone. It has captured the minds and hearts of people just like MSN has. No matter what VoIP and IM do, email is still needed by everyone. So Google combines the three together, which makes it even all the more attractive. Even if one person doesn’t use one or even two of the three services, they will still have use of the other. It’s a one stop communication service that everyone will use or think of using. Google looks set to pull off the very idea that Microsoft had tried with MSN/Hotmail and failed. There is just one more logical step that needs to be taken.
Subscription.
Gmail will not be in “beta” forever. And when it is finally “released”, most likely it will no longer be free, especially with all the value-added services that Google Talk now adds to it. So the final question comes down to how much it will be? and are we willing to pay for it?
A huge portion of Google future revenue rests on this, I wager.
[...] I had wrote about how Gmail and Google Talk would eventually intergrate someday, but this is beyond what I imagined. This is a very good tactic by Google firstly, everyone in your Gmail contact list is avalible for chat, no need to add them. This totally goes behind the back of all the other IM clients. Next, this removes the load that the Gmail mail servers are getting in processing and saving all those single-line emails. Now the chat servers will handle the load, then save the whole chat history as one big, easier to handle, chat history to Gmail. [...]