Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch notes a pair of studies indicating that large portions of Yahoo!'s traffic, and time spent on the Yahoo! domain, come from e-mail and instant messaging, and suggests that Google should develop a stand-alone IM program. (Just what we need, another incompatible IM program.) TechDirt observes that Yahoo! capitlizes on its heavy IM use by integrating the IM experience with many other platform features such as Mail, Finance, and 360. It's easy to point out that Google's integration efforts (which currently consist of linking to various services on the home page and the personalized home page) is nascent. But, of course, Yahoo! has had a lot more time to develop breadth of service. You could also argue that the toolbars of both companies spend more time with users than any other products.
Google's Lack of Integration
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Now that I've finished reading, I feel I should mention that I like google.
One of the reasons I no longer use Yahoo is the super-simplistic ideology that surrounds the Google site. While the different Yahoo services are "more integrated" I think the result is a much more clutered experiance. I think it would be foolish for Google to risk offending their user base by trying to be more like Yahoo.
Simplicty rules. If integration is Yahoo, then I'll settle for divergence.
3. I think one of the biggest challenges facing GOOG at the moment is the integration of things they DO have. Now that they have the notion of "signing in" for the portal, the system gets me lost sometimes when I try to sign in and out (for multiple accounts) of GMail.
True to their reputation, I think the engineers over there are building, building, building and then they'll worry about how to tie it all together (and make money at something besides Web search) down the road.
5. I believe an IM client would be horrible for Google. The three biggest clients--MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger have too strong of a grasp on the market that Google would have difficulty attracting users. Google already has integration in that so many websites have these "Google Ads" iFrames. Those alone can do tons more than a messaging client would do.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Walid Matar
1. I haven't finished reading the post yet, but I've already got my 2 cents to add. I think google would be better off buying/releasing an all-in-one messenger client rather than creating yet another proprietary format.
Even if they wanted to introduce their own IM scheme (hopefully integrated with their other services I already use) then they'd be better off releasing a multi-service client to go with it.
Or better yet, with the quality of today's opensource/free multi-service software, they could develop the service, and release an API.
This would make it easier for the authors of these programs (http://adiumx.com, http://gaim.sourceforge.net) to integrate the new service into their apps.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by BM5k