I have two major beefs and one looming concern regarding the Google
Talk client. The looming concern is privacy. The major beefs are that Google completely obviates all of its own
rhetoric about making the platform as open and accessible as
possible by a) limiting it only to Gmail
users and b) not releasing a Mac client. Hello?
I can almost see the gleam in the mythical Google eye about this
application putting them one huge step closer to routing around Microsoft by obviating the desktop layer. There is a
very tiny reflection in that gleam of the parallel universe Google wants us all to one day wake up in, stretch to the
joyous singing of birds and boot into Google OS. But guess what? Average Jane and Jack Computer User (real names
withheld to protect the innocent) are nowhere near ready to dive into Google OS. Not even close. The people Google
needs to be wooing are the early adopter tech freaks and geeks — and those people, disproportionately,
are running Mac OS X.
Not only is Google not wooing these people, but Google is annoying these people because it has bad breath and didn't
bring any flowers on the first date. It's like inviting a vegetarian over for dinner, serving meat as the main course
and telling them they can eat the side dishes. There's precious little information about when or even if a Mac client
will be developed — the FAQ states: "The downloadable Google
Talk client is not compatible with Macintosh or Linux systems at this time. We look forward to offering support for
more operating systems in the future." Right. It doesn't get much more grim than that. And there is so very little
incentive — bordering on zero — for Mac users to use Google Talk. All the goodness is in the Google Talk client —
there's absolutely nothing special about using a Google-over-Jabber protocol to talk to the contacts you already have
in your buddy list on AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. As my colleague Laurie over at TUAW
quipped: "well this was fun. are there any dancing bears or fish in funny hats? if not, i think i've seen all i need to
see."
Strategically, this is just bad. If the game is to try to rope in the Mac users by sucking in a critical mass of
their Windows-using counterparts — that’s just annoying. It’s bad enough trying to manage a chaotic buddy list with a
third of my contacts on AIM, a third on Yahoo Messegner, and another third who are actually duped across AIM and Yahoo
both — I need them on both protocols and two is already too freakin’ many. When the news hit Weblogs, Inc. and we all
did as early adopter geeks must do to try it out, my buddy list swelled with yet another duplicate set of contacts. As
a Mac user, not only am I not getting any tangible benefit from the Google Talk client, but I’m also forced to deal
with even further exploding contact list chaos.
I have a Windows machine on my desktop also, though it’s much less frequently used — I trot it out when companies
release some must-see software for Windows only (<cough>
Google Earth
<cough> Google
Desktop). This is how I know of all the slickness that Mac users are missing out on — the interface of the Google
Talk client is very sweet, and the appearance and positioning of notification windows as emails and IMs come in is what
makes the whole thing interesting. The integration with Gmail for populating your Friend list by frequency is lost in
third-party clients on the Mac. The searchability of your chats is lost on the Mac as well because they’re searchable
only via Google Desktop which is — guess what! — Windows only. For a company beating a warpath against
Microsoft, Google sure is helping to secure their dominance on the
desktop by supporting, primarily, the Microsoft platform — instead of approaching their toolmaking as the
paradigm shift it needs to
be.
Most companies look at the statistics on market share and user base by platform as an indicator of how to maximize
mindshare. In some cases, this works — but in social software, this heuristic can prove a costly mistake.
1. Great post Barb and, of course, you know from our chat last night that I am in complete agreement with you on this. While I understand Google's play - I tend to agree with you that they're ignoring an incredibly powerful constituency of evangelists and early adopters by ignoring the Mac OS X community.
Personally I get chills thinking about how nice the new Google Dekstop Sidebar would look rendered in Aqua.
It's a risky move to assume that the Mac market will wait patiently until Google co-ops the Windows desktop before delivering some of these goodies to the "rest of us" (yes, I do have a Mac - both a work and home).
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Marc Orchant