Microsoft adds Google Chat to Outlook.com
15 May 2013
That Microsoft is not quite impressed with Google's products is well known. But what is less known is that this is not true about all of Google's products.
Microsoft's Outlook.com, the software giant's free email service is working with Google Chat to allow users of its free email service the option of logging into Google Chat to exchange instant messages and to engage in audio or video conversations.
According to analysts, the tie-up announced yesterday is likely prove to be an uneasy alliance between Microsoft Corp and Google Inc.
Microsoft is projecting its move of aligning with Google Chat as an example of how it was trying to help connect people who relied on various services to interact with one another.
Both Outlook.com and Google Chat would be available free as a way for Microsoft and Google to attract more online traffic to their advertising-supported services.
With the latest addition, Outlook.com account holders would get one more way to interact d after Microsoft's own Skype chat service and Facebook's messaging service. Microsoft pulled its Messenger chat service earlier this year as part of a switchover to Skype, which became part of the company for a consideration of $8.5 billion in 2011.
However, even as it was offering Google Chat to its Outlook.com users, Microsoft had been warning consumers that Google's search engine and other services could not be trusted. The company had spent millions of dollars on a series of critical ads that started appearing online, in print and on television around six months back.
According to analysts, Microsoft's move comes just days ahead of Google's rumored rounding up its Google Talk and Hangouts services into a unified "Babel" service.
Outlook.com users told Microsoft that they wanted to chat to their contacts using Google Talk, so the company utilised Google's APIs to build the support. It would for the present work with text chat, as video and audio chat asnot supported.
According to senior director, Dharmesh Mehta, if it turned out a lot of people wanted the voice and video with Google, that was something Microsoft would go talk to them about. The integration works the moment users connected Google account to Outlook.com, letting users chat in the sidebar.
According to Mehta, the recent completion of the upgrade from Hotmail to Outlook.com, was a rather sudden change for some. He said for the average Hotmail customer, this was a pretty big change relative to things one normally experienced. He said apart from that, it had been successful for the team involved in migrating millions of accounts. He said this went better than any migration he had seen.
