Yesterday, I was jolted when I suddenly discovered these grey and green bars next to the Google local search results. I clicked on impulse and was immediately taken to my Skype client to make the call. My immediate reaction was, “Oh, then I have to pay, and here I was thinking I would make a call at Google’s expense.”
For a long time, Google has been experimenting with their call buttons. The earlier ‘click to call’ buttons were a disaster by Google standards. Personally, I tried calling several advertisers and the system hardly ever worked for me without a glitch.
The Indian population were mostly using Yahoo Messenger as their IM client, and then a few of them shifted over to GTalk for the email-plus-chat benefit. But to this date the majority uses Yahoo Messenger. Skype, I know, is extremely popular in the US and Europe, but has been unable to create a niche for itself in the Indian market. The demographics of Skype users, I presume, would include a bunch of non-resident Indians and a handful of IT-savvy metropolitans. But, the fact remains that Skype offers the best audio quality in internet telephony.
So, this partnership is certainly a huge breakthrough for Skype. Also, the Google users should find it useful. Overall, a win-win situation.
Unfortunately though, in my little experience I have noticed that the Indian population (me included) is sadly jinxed and biased against adapting to newer technologies. A month or so back, I had started using Twitter, and though I marveled at the possibilities thrown open by the integration of internet and telephony, I quickly set it aside as an extra load on my list of social networking sites. The Indian population took a lot of time adapting to the internet and email and are still getting used to the idea of online transactions.
I am afraid such rapid technology modifications will only alienate the long tail of the Indian market, which Google and a lot of other organizations have been eyeing for sometime now.
