Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Microsoft throws down phone gauntlet to Google

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Microsoft throws down phone gauntlet to Google

Microsoft has just bought a telecoms company, another string to it's arsenal in the forthcoming VoIP wars.

Skype is undoubtably the current winner in IM/VoIP battles, but there's Gizmo from the Linspire lot, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messgenger, AIM, and now GoogleTalk so the market is going to progress rapidly.

Microsoft has a huge established base of users and has released their web services framework which fundamentally support VoIP, though Google (currently) are considered user friendly and not the evil empire.

Google have also announced they will allow open server to server communications allowing other IM networks to join the GoogleTalk service (assuming the other networks want to join). It can be expected that existing Jabber (XMPP) networks will be the first to be in line.

By Google using an open protocol and allowing s2s connections they could rapidly expand and dominate the IM space.