Microsoft, er, I mean… Google Talk

Google released Google Talk this week, as you may have heard. It's essentially a chatting application, much like iChat and AIM. However it doesn't offer more advanced features like emoticons, fancy fonts or file transfers. It does however require that you have a Gmail account, which is still by-invite-only.

I don't know about you, but with Google releasing the kinds of applications they have been recently, I'm starting to wonder how they're different from Microsoft apart from not having an OS of their own. Hmmm... maybe that's their next project?

Windows-only software... leveraging their influence from previous products to try and bully their way into an industry that doesn't need any more competition... adding their own protocols to open-source standards like RSS... this is usually Microsoft behavior.

I suppose you could argue other industry behemoths like Sony and Apple do this kind of thing as well. But Google's a different kind of company, right? ... right? Sure, I'm exaggerating. They certainly haven't done that much to invite comparisons to Microsoft's abuse of the market. But there seems to be a trend here and it doesn't feel right. This sure doesn't seem to be the same Google.

It looks a lot like a company fueled primarily by shareholder expectations, rather than the innovation that got them here.