* Google has IM, but more is likely to come soon
For some time, there has been substantial speculation about Google’s entry into the instant messaging market. Some believe the company’s entry would help to push the consumer-grade IM industry closer to standardization, while others feel that it would put enormous competitive pressure on the big three consumer IM companies – AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft.
For some time, there has been substantial speculation about Google’s entry into the instant messaging market. Some believe the company’s entry would help to push the consumer-grade IM industry closer to standardization, while others feel that it would put enormous competitive pressure on the big three consumer IM companies – AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Actually, Google already has an IM product called Hello, although IM is more of a feature of Hello’s image-sharing, blog-posting capability than it is an IM product in its own right. Add to Hello Google’s recent acquisition of Picasa, a company that simplifies the task of managing digital photos; Google’s Gmail, which offers enormous amounts of storage and great search capabilities; and the company’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, an early entrant in the blogging industry. These moves all seem to point to Google becoming a multimedia communications company, not a search engine company.
I believe Google will likely launch an IM offering within the next six months. The product will likely be a combination of the company’s IM and e-mail capabilities with some multimedia thrown in that will be a sort of hybrid IM and blogging tool to provide IM with persistence. Just to be clear, this is all speculation at this point, since I have no inside information on the company’s plans.
The value of such a tool would be significant, particularly for data mining in a business setting. Having the ability to communicate in a hierarchical fashion would be extremely valuable, allowing seamless communication between IM and e-mail as many products already do today.
The value of persistence – making IM and e-mail available on a long-term basis – combined with powerful search tools would significantly aid the ability to mine message stores for information. Imagine every IM and e-mail message stored in a corporate archive and being able to extract the most relevant information from this repository in the time it takes to do a Google search today, perhaps using nothing more than an IM interface. While these capabilities exist today in various forms and from a number of vendors, Google might well find a significant business market for these capabilities in a well-integrated package.
