So Google announced its new IM/VoIP client today - Google Talk. This puts it in direct competition with some fairly well entrenched players like Skype (VoIP), MSN, Yahoo, Trillian, etc. I've been struggling to understand why Google has entered this marketspace.
I mean, to me, Google is a search-technology company. They started out with the Web, and their extension to the desktop was inevitable. Indeed, the move seemed to hark back to the heady days of Windows 95, when Microsoft tried to web-enable the operating system. (Nobody really seems to care much about Active Directories these days, eh? At least, not on the PC-side ... there're are a few servers kicking around. Anyway, back to Google ...)
Google's evolution has been through extensions of their core search technology, which now seems to encompass content delivery as well. Here's a sample:
- Google Mail (index your mail and better search through them. Also,
raise the stakes by offering large storage capacities for free)
- Desktop Search (search for files, or within files. BTW, this rocks. I've been juggling between MSN's search and Google's for a while, and I think Google trumps MSN ... at least, in its current build. Also, Google released Version 2.0 a few days ago, which incorporates some new functionality, essentially built on search technology & content delivery)
- Blogger (online community development, thereby increasing the number of pages they have indexed, etc.)
- Google Maps (Search for addresses with the added functionality of getting driving directions) - which by enhancement spawned ...
- Google Earth (overlay satellite imagery on the maps)
- A now-aborted plan to index library books, technical documents, etc.
The only non-search-related piece of technology Google's had (or at least, raised brand awareness of) was Picasa & Hello (which are inter-related, BTW). Hello is the only piece of software that allows you WIndows users to upload photos to their Blogger pages. Picasa was an independent company until Google bought them out in 2004, and made their software free. For the record, Picasa rocks.
So in the face of all this, why invest in a collaborative tool such as VoIP? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem to support either online content creation, delivery, or indexing! The only way I see it making sense is if Google then creates a voice recognition tool that somehow indexes your voice conversations so that you can search through them. It would be a bold move, but voice-recgonition software have long since been notorious for difficulty in usage.
Time will tell, and all that.
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