The Integrative Stream

Google’s IM Strategy

I’d better get my two cents in on Google’s entry into the Instant Messaging market before it’s old news, so here goes:

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last week has noticed, Google has launched an Instant Messaging network. Google has generally been good at producing very simple, clean user interfaces, and the Talk client is good example, without the bells and whistles (and incessant advertising) of the default Yahoo and AOL software. And that’s about it, really. I haven’t tried the voice functions yet, since I don’t have a microphone on my testing PC, but the various reviews say it works fine.

The problem is that that there are already too many instant messaging networks. With Talk, I now have accounts on three of them. But I generally don’t think about the network at all – I use Trillian on the PC, which combines my AIM and MSN (and now Google Talk) contacts into a single client. A surprising number of instant messaging users still don’t know about software like Trillian, but more learn every day, and eventually I fully expect to see instant messaging networks treated like long distance networks: it doesn’t matter if I have MCI or Sprint. The only difference is that the translation will take place on the client PC, via software that can access multiple networks, rather than at the local carrier level.

In fact, since Google Talk uses Jabber, a standard protocol, it’s already supported by clients like Trillian Pro and the latest versions of Apple’s iChat. That means that Google’s Talk client is unlikely to achieve much market share in the end, however clean it is, because there are so many other options and nobody is going to abandon their other networks just for Google’s client. It doesn’t add much residual value except the voice functions, and Trillian and iChat already support that over AOL’s network (and it works fine). Since it’s so easy to be on multiple networks, the advantage of being on a single large network is minimal. This may make it easier for “upstarts” like Google to get into the space, but at the same time it’s unlikely that the introduction of Google Talk is going to bring large numbers of people into instant messaging who weren’t already using it. And voice-over-IM has been around for years, and I haven’t really seen it take off. It’s not going to be the differentiating feature. So why bother?

I think there’s a good reason. Even if you don’t use Google’s Talk client, you’re still using Google’s servers, and that gives Google the opportunity to index your conversations. As of today, the Google Talk privacy policy states that they will not do this – text and voice conversations are not held in the server logs. But the privacy policy can be changed, and doing so gives Google the opportunity to create a valuable service: online, web searchable records of all your IM conversations. I would actually like to have this available to me. That’s the real appeal of webmail, and GMail in particular: I can access my extensive email archive, which is full of addresses, phone numbers, and old conversations, from rural Cambodia.

Google’s strategy doesn’t require server based indexing, though. After installing Google Talk I installed the new version of the Google Desktop software. They’re already integrated–the Talk client becomes a plugin to the new Google Sidebar. As far as I can tell, Talk conversations aren’t being indexed, at least not in real-time. But they will be. And this will be useful. Instant messaging isn’t just for teenagers – it’s a valuable business tool. About five years ago I spoke with IBM’s John Patrick about instant messaging use, and was told that somewhere around a quarter million messages were exchanged within the corporation every day. This was five years ago. More recently, I’ve seen major software specification work go on via instant messaging, and my last company relied heavily on IM technologies for interoffice collaboration.

Since Google’s strategy is clearly to own, if not the desktop itself, the information retrieval aspects of the desktop. There are really only two ways people communicate personal or business information online: email and instant messaging. Google Desktop already indexes GMail and can also index email from other email clients (I had it index my Thunderbird email). It even indexes stored conversations from the AOL and MSN IM clients. Since the Talk interface is built in, it’s inevitable that Talk conversations will be indexed as well. It has to be – otherwise the product is a point solution that won’t even drive any advertising revenue.

All of which wraps back around to the question of why they started their own network in the first place, rather than just building the indexing support into Google Desktop, and possibly launching their own Trillian-like multi-protocol client to embed within the Desktop sidebar. As discussed above, I the only answer I can come up with is that there will be a server-based indexing offering in the future.

Microsoft, incidentally, really missed the boat on this one. Outlook’s index functions have been so bad in the past that I haven’t even tried using the last few releases for email. Microsoft has had years to integrate Outlook with MSN Messenger, and they haven’t.