I’ve just read a very interesting article over at Drunken Blog, about the state of the IM market and how Google’s entrance to it will affect the other major players. Worth a read if you’ve got a spare minute or two.

Unless you’re living under a rock, chances are you’ve probably heard that Google announced their Google Talk service recently, which ties into ones Gmail account. Once they acquired a company with an instant messaging solution, speculation was flying about them releasing something, but no one really knew what form it would take.

They’ve branched out into native Windows software recently, with apps like Google Desktop Search or the Google Toolbar, while at the same time focusing on more services via your browser, like Google Maps. What was announced earlier was a native Windows client that communicates via the Jabber protocol, but we’ll only touch upon that in a cursory way.

Rather, we’ll be focusing on what wasn’t announced, and how Google’s competition in the space — Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo — will be reacting.

Read at Drunken Blog