Now, because I’m often getting told off for making my comments on other peoples blogs longer than the original post itself, I decided I’d write my reply here simply so that I couldn’t be accused of it again. ;-) Also, I digress significantly from Mike’s original post so its probably more appropriate here anyway ;-)

If you haven’t read Mike’s original post I suggest you do so now. I’m going to kick straight in as if you have, so if you haven’t, you’re missing the first part of this discussion. ;-)

I don’t think AOL offering 2gig email to all AIM customers had anything to do with the Google transaction. From memory, they announced it well before the Google deal was finalised. The initial visible change from the Google buy-in will be that AIM and Google Talk will be able to chat with each other soon. This would mean that someone with any of AIM, ICQ, iChat (Apple’s client) or Google Talk will be able to chat with people on the other networks without needing to install yet another client or create yet another account.

Here’s where I completely split from Mike’s original thread ;-)

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The coincidence of the Google Talk/AIM arrangement is that shortly after that was made public, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger will soon be talking to each other with ease. Including audio/video chat. In a way, they had to. AIM still has the Lion’s share within the US. MSN Messenger is extremely popular in the European, Asian and Oceanic regions, but AIM still dominates the US/UK markets.

What makes all of this really interesting is that now anyone connected to any Jabber server can add Google Talk people to their jabber list, just by adding the Google account that person uses to connect to Google Talk. In most cases this would be their GMail address. Thus, suddenly the world of Google Talk is now open to a lot of corporate environments because many companies run Jabber as their in house messaging service, not trusting others hosted outside their network perimeter.

Now, admittedly there is a significant number of people using Microsoft Exchange and hosting their chat services through that, but it is not as many people as are using IBMs chat services. But both pale in comparison to the number of corporate entities using Jabber services in-house. Why? Because Jabber is open and freely available and they’re not tied in to one technology provider for a continuing service. More so, they can still get paid vendor support for a huge number of the various Jabber server products available. They can also pick and choose from a myriad of clients available on the market to come up with the best service that fits in with what they actually want. Not what they have to go with because thats all the vendor offers.

The biggest coming battle between all these giants is going to be the VoIP space. Everyone is gearing up for an absolutely massive war that will cost billions of dollars (literally) and will cause all the technology companies to either partner with, or make enemies of, the traditional Telecommunications companies. The “Baby Bells” and their decendants being the first and biggest example of this.

Right now we have the traditional telco’s in the US trying to get the FCC to allow them to charge the media suppliers (companies like iTunes Music Store, Google, Microsoft, Real Networks, Napster and all the many others now providing large media access) for the use of the ISPs networks. Even though the person dialed in or connected via broadband to that provider is already paying for the network bandwidth and access. Why? Because they’re scared of the big companies stealing their profit margins by offering the services they have traditionally relied on.

VoIP is the biggest danger or threat to the telco market ever. Suddenly you don’t need to buy phone services from them. You just want bandwidth. Most people pay a flat rate for their bandwidth. Don’t need to pay for call waiting, voicemail, call diversion or any many other services that the telco’s have traditionally used to make their significant profits.

We are now living in a dangerous world. If the telco’s succeed with their lobbying of the US government, every byte will be paid for twice. Once by you, the end user, and again by the person providing the information you use. Suddenly, your costs are going to go up significantly because those other companies will need to charge more for the service if its going to be profitable.

Right now, everyone is scared of Google. In less than 10 years its come on to the scene and has grown to absolutely mammoth proportions. Its fingers stretch from search to advertising in newspapers and magazines. It offers a service where you can see an ad, click on a phone icon, enter in your phone number and Google will call your phone and call the company that placed the ad. At $0 cost to you.

We now see Google moving in to the ISP business with its sizable stake in AOL. But even that has ramifications even further. By buying in to AOL, Google has created a very significant business relationship with all of Time Warner. And what does TimeWarner own?

Go further. Google has significant partnerships with some of the Disney companies for the Google Video Store. Apple now has a very strong tie to Disney in that Steve Jobs just sold Pixar to Disney and earned himself a place on the board there. iTMS suddenly has Disney products available for download. Apple also has a significant and historic relationship with AOL.

See a pattern forming here?

Email is only on the very fringe of whats really going on. The battle is for media. Email just happens to be the place companies started puffing their chest hairs at each other. Google goes 2gig, so Yahoo! and Hotmail do too. AOL finds itself starting to get marginalised, so it has no choice but to offer free email, and the best place to start for that is with its very sizable AIM customer base.

Skype comes along and starts to offer extremely cheap international phone calls from any computer in the world. For the most part, you can call anywhere using Skype and it’ll only cost you €0.02 per minute.

The Skype offerings get exceptionally popular across Europe. So popular in fact that the Telco’s notice it before the technology companies do. But when the technology companies notice it, what happens?

Rumors of a Google Messenger application start to surface. With Google’s recent phonecall ads showing up, the speculation is that it’ll immediately be a phone service. Suddenly, both Yahoo! and MSN almost immediately buy companies that offer a similar service with the intention of integrating them in to their messenger applications. They’re deadly frightened that they hadn’t seen it coming and the fastest way to get in on that market is to buy it, not develop it in house.

Google Talk hits the market and initially most people are disappointed. Its plain chat or plain voice calls between Google Talk clients. No bells or whistles here. And thats how it remains today. But the rumors still exist that something big is lurking in the background for the Google Talk service. And the honest truth is, you’d be silly not to think that Google has bigger plans in store for the Google Talk service.

But right now, PC to PC chatting is really the primary role of VoIP services at the moment. Its a free way of communicating with your office, friends and family around the world. This is why I personally think Google hasn’t made public any effort or intention to support PC to phone communications just yet. I think they’re waiting till the market is just a weee bit more ripe. ;-) Don’t forget, VoIP is not new, but the way it is now being used is. With so many options available, the best method has yet to be defined. The way I see it, that won’t happen until we get convergence of the Instant Messenger space. Once there is a single clear standard there, then we’ll start to see computer/PC based VoIP services really take off.

So thats my views on the current state of affairs. :-) In a way the big battles are revolving around AOL. But that is only because of the size of their AIM market base. Email was just the first place the big companies started showing off. They fully weren’t expecting Skype to do so well so rapidly and they’ve all been scrambling to recover from that one properly.

But keep watching the Telco’s themselves. They’re the ones that could really cause the problems. Especially in the US. If they do so, I think you’ll find that Google will have no hesitation in expanding its current free metro-WiFi service to as many other main cities across the US as they need to. With the knowledge of AOL to help them, they could become as big tomorrow in the ISP space as AOL was through the late 90s and early 00′s. Remember, AOL bought TimeWarner, not the other way round.