Google: Developers, developers, developers

How did Microsoft come to dominate desktop software? Hardball business tactics aside, the company has for 20-plus years understood--and catered to--software developers.

No surprise then that Google, which may have its eye on becoming the software platform of the future, also understands the value of tight relations with the developer community.

Google Maps, Desktop and Talk, the company's instant messaging software which launched on Wednesday all offer "hooks" that let developers build on top of the services. Google also provides an application programming interface to its search service among other coder-friendly tools.

Still, it's hard to imagine how Larry Page or Sergey Brin can match this.

Blog community response:

"(Google Talk is) based on Jabber/XMPP protocol which is an open standard, designed for distributed environment. This is nice because it's developer-friendly, nobody wants to reverse engineering a proprietary protocol...This is why i love google, they know what developers want. Once the protocol is open, developers will hack on it, make it more robust, Flickr is a good example."
--Don't think, just read

"I reiterate the mantra that built Microsoft: who controls the UI controls the user; who controls the API controls the programmer. Great businesses are made of this."
--David Card, Jupiter Analyst Weblogs

"Google gets a big thumbs up from me for refusing the temptation to create its own IM protocol, adhering instead to the prexisting Jabber open XML specification. Let's hear it for open standards...Apart from all that, though, this is just the launch of an IM service. Is it important when seen in conjunction with the recent iteration of the Google Desktop package as another decided step towards the desktop? Undoubtedly."
--tecosystems