My favorite Google App is now a Windows Desktop App

I am a very heavy user of Instant Messaging tools.
At any one time I may have Skype open for voice and chatting to 2 or 3 people in New Zealand, Windows Live Messenger chatting with our offshore team in India, the implementation team in Chicago and Live Video call with my nephew, I also have been using Google Chat embedded in Gmail.

I can now add another to this list. I installed Google Talk Beta for the web (on my igoogle dashboard which is pretty cool way to chat) and the Windows version onto the desktop.

I am a little disappointed with the web based version as it appears to be a little sluggish and obviously lacks the voice call features of the windows version, but I am most impressed with the desktop version. Because its beta, functionality is not quite up there when compared to its more mature competitors. But the user experience is very intuitive, it looks pretty without too much clutter, responds well and it has a cool VoiceMail feature!!

Google has done a good job outside of the browser with this app. Their simple,uncrowded approach inside of the browser translates well to the desktop, but now with the superior response and accessibility of a desktop application.

I still believe the desktop will continue to be a major player even in the dominant arena of SaaS and Utility Computing. Perhaps there's something to Software + Services.