Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Here’s one of the interesting back-stories of the Google Talk announcement. It’s the Global IP Sound (GIPS) stock prices.

Global IP Sound is the company behind the amazing sound that Skype has been able to achieve.  Others have been trying to duplicate this for some time, and so far few have achieved it. DiamondWare, in fact, is the only company I am aware of that can provide comparable audio quality.  In May I had a conversation with members of  the MSN Messenger team in Redmond, who admitted to me at the time that they didn’t have the sound quality of Skype.  A month ago (July) they licensed that code from Global IP Sound.  Yahoo did too. Now Google has done the same.  GIPS stock has just popped up to 18.50. The market certainly believes that GIPS is on its way to being the dominant sound player in the VoIP world with licensees like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft licensing their code.

Skype’s other claim to fame was that it just worked. Firewall traversal wasn’t an issue any more.  Google has duplicated this.  MSN has not, yet.

Skype is proprietary, Google is open protocols, and MSN is slowly moving toward SIP. 

It looks to me like Google is gunning for Skype with everything that Skype has, but on an open platform. MSN will be hot on their tails.

As the old saying goes, we live in interesting times.  It’s certainly exciting to watch the chess pieces rearranging themselves on this board.

Commentary from Andy Abramson and Jeff Pulver on Google Talk.

Google Talk is out.  You can read about the details of what it is on Stuart Henshall’s Skype Journal.  He has a detailed post describing his first impressions.

To me, the interesting points are:

1) It’s not SIP.  It’s based on Jabber, and the Jabber XMPP protocol.  What does this mean for SIP?

2) It’s completely open.  Any Jabber client can connect into it, which means that the business model that AOL and MSN have used (fund IM with advertising dollars) is not the business model which Google is using initially.  So, what is the business model?

A reasonable supposition is that Google is trying to dominate the directory space as effectively as it has dominated search.  By linking GMail and Google Talk, they’ve given you more reason than ever to use GMail, and to invite your friends to use GMail.

The folks at Skype are likely having kittens over this.  The tight integration with GMail will mean an instant, and large community. The people who really need to worry about this are the ILECs.  It is they who control the dominant directory assets today.