The freight train that is Google roared into new territory last week with the addition of Google Talk, an instant messaging service that also supports voice links, and Desktop 2 , a PC-based tool that could help Google gain valuable desktop real estate.
These announcements come on the heels of news that Google plans to issue another $4 billion worth of stock to fund future developments.
Theories abound about what Google will do with that windfall, but the sky appears to be the limit. While Microsoft is occupied fixing problems with legacy products, Google is churning out new wares that result in water-cooler buzz – everything from a news aggregation service to Google Mobile for cell phone access and a program called Google Earth that lets users zoom in from space to a specific location.
It isn’t clear how Google will make money with things such as Earth, but tools such as Google Talk and Desktop 2 help round out the company’s growing collection of PC-based software and position Google for future advances.
Desktop 2 is a downloadable Windows application that combines hard drive search (the primary focus of the original Desktop beta) with Outlook search and what Google calls personalized Web search. The latter learns from what you view online – from news stories and RSS feeds to Web pages and photos – and automatically populates a vertical screen sidebar with information it deems relevant to your interests.
That sidebar also supports Google’s free Gmail service and, by extension, Talk. Talk adds IM capabilities to Gmail and support for audio chat (via VoIP) between Gmail users.
Talk is based on the Jabber open source code and, as such, users will be able to exchange messages with other IM clients that support the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol , including Trillian, Adium and iChat.
While the company faces what would appear to be insurmountable odds in deciding to compete with IM leaders – AOL has roughly 40 million users, Yahoo close to 20 million and Microsoft MSN almost 15 million – that really isn’t the point. The company is adding incremental value where it can with the idea that the whole will ultimately be greater than the sum of the parts.
The Holy Grail is having a prominent enough role in the user interface that developers start to build to the environment, further fleshing it out and making it more important. These new tools help move the company toward that goal. And who could forget that Google hired one of the principal designers of the Firefox browser, so the ultimate leap might not be too far off.
