Yesterday the news regarding Google's new IM service 'Google Talk' was leaked, and like they had said, today Google Talk's beta was released to the public. I have already downloaded and started using it. I must say, it is great. It doesn't have too many features right now (not even smilies), but you can call up people and have audio conversations and the interface is really cool, simple and easy to use, just like Gmail, Google Maps, etc.
Actually, Google is trying to get other services to become interoperable (called it's Federation program), so in the future you might be able to use Google Talk to talk to an AIM, MSN or Yahoo user and vice-versa, just like you can talk to anyone in the world on a phone, regardless of the service they use. Google has the muscle to make it happen and I hope they succeed.
Atleast Google's technology is sound and more efficient than everyone else, not to mention they continue innovating. Google remains platform independent and does not coerce people into using certan programs just to maintain its supremacy. It does so by constantly providing superior products and services that are almost peerless. Google is happy to collaborate with other companies. It even provided search services to Yahoo for some time, until Yahoo didn't want to continue their partnership. The same cannot be said about Microsoft.
Google does work much better than anything nowadays. Probably because it's so simple, there isn't as much to break. I can only wait until the days of a Google operating system.
Google is not simple, only its interface is by design simple and innovative. Underneath all that simplicity is some of the most complex search algorithms and technologies. Just look at Google's hiring page to see why they are still going strong. They hire people from all areas of computer science, and they hire only the best.
I really doubt Google will release its own OS any time soon. There still a lot of stuff to be done in web technologies. Also, designing an OS is a very difficult task, especially one that can break Microsoft's dominance in the home PC market.
08-25-2005 01:10 AM
