Although they are slugging it out in the "search" arena right now, the fight is spilling over into collaboration! Tomorrow Google will be announcing the Beta of Google Desktop 2, which takes search a bit further by recording what your interests are and having an intelligent agent that presents you with web pages, blogs, news stories, etc. that it thinks you might be interested in. This new version will have a sidebar for: e-mail, RSS, Atom news, weather, stocks, etc., a scratchpad, quick find, and integration into the Outlook toolbar. It will also extend the number of file types it can search so in can look in MSN Messenger Chats as well as networked file drives

I have always said where you have content you have interaction (collaboration).
Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Micorosoft are now set to duke it out in the IM arena. This new Google Talk application should be using both text and voice and will put Google directly in competition with Skype (as well as Microsoft and others who are going after Skypes 40 million users).

Other bloggers (Om Malik, http://gigaom.com) believe that Google is using the Jabber open-source IM engine, which would allow Google users to connect to other IM systems that currently work with Jabber (including: AOL, iChat, ICQ). At the same time Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are all upgrading their IM systems to add VoIP features.

Google is rumored to be thinking about another $4B stock offering to help fuel this fight. It is my contention that Google should just use some of that money to buy Skype and put them in a much better place in the race against Microsoft and would add many millions of users to the cause!

What do you think about all of this?