At the same time, I don’t think it would be wise to think of this as a fight between open standards/free software and proprietary technology though many would advocate that it be taken as such. Google is not doing this for a common good. They’re a commercial entity and they have opted for jabber protocol only because it allows them the fastest entry into this neglected-by-them segment that is growing stronger by the moment. They needed a foothold, fast, and this is what they’ve tried to achieve. And like many have questioned in their individual discussions, how will people feel when Google starts parsing their chats to present context-sensitive text ads in the middle of the conversations?

My main case, however, was for the business user. Many of my contacts that I interact with over the Internet started using Skype to hold voice conversations. Yet, despite it having a capable IM client of its own, we inadvertently end up holding text-discussions in one of The 4.

Skype became popular because it is free. And it provided better quality of voice communication than anything that existed at that point in time.

Google is coming to a saturated market wearing underwear. As of now, the name will feature only in the ‘also-ran’ list. But like my friend so optimistically put it: “I bet they have a cool game plan. You just wait and see.”