Look Who’s Talking Back
by Aner Ravon

The new Google Talk, released over the weekend, makes GTalk the best desktop communication software. At least in my opinion.

I always liked GTalk for the clean look, but the wide userbase did not quite agree with me, granting Google a lame 1% market share. I wouldn’t be deterred by the low adoption so far, as Google are racking up the right ingredients necessary to create a sustainable advantage over MSN, Yahoo and Skype.

File transfer and voicemail are commodity IM features, granted. What makes the difference is the brilliant integration with Gmail. You don’t really have to think. It’s all there.

Unified Messaging a curse? Google are realizing it. And properly. Gmail is the ultimate message store - almost unlimited in size, friendly, versatile. GTalk complements it perfectly with messaging and voice. This is not something Skype can compete with (they don’t have a powerful storage option) and not something MSN can compete with (they have the assets but not in such a clean and integrated way).

The only viable competitor I see to Google in the long run is Yahoo. GTalk needs to show some traction first though. With the recent improvements I bet it’s on the right way there.

Aner Ravon
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