I was booting up my machine. I had just logged in and all the apps were firing up one by one. So I must have fired up something and might be typing into it, when Google Talk fired up in between. So everything that I had 
just written went into the google talk sign in textbox.
Now, I usually save my user id and password on google talk so it automatically signs in. So, since i had typed in something by mistake into the User ID textbox, the user ID changed. So instead of my real id I had "my" typed into the user id input box. Ideally in a scenario like this, what should happen is it should try to log in and then once it fails, it should quit trying.
What Google talk did instead, is it kept on trying with the same user id and password over and over again, automatically. Now at this point in time, I don't even know something like this is happening in the back ground. So eventually when I come around to Google Talk, I see that the User ID is wrong and the status is "Account Locked". So I type in the correct UserID and I see a CAPTCHA to unlock my account. And interestingly the CAPTCHA doesn't give me an image, but it gives me a long message saying something like, "The service is unavailable at the moment, please try again later". So I wonder what would happen if I type in the entire message as a CAPTCHA input. So I did and interestingly, it solved the CAPTCHA.
Unfortunately all this happened so fast, I didn't take a screen print. Anyways, Now I tried it again. I signed out, typed in "my" into the user id input and tried to log in again. The status showed "Account Locked" which means they had locked out an account whose user id is "my" for trying to sign in with the wrong password more than the specified no. of times. Now I changed the user id to my real user id again and I see the CAPTCHA again, only this time it was a working real CAPTCHA with the image. Now I really wanted to check if this CAPTCHA is a real one or a fake one. Without putting in any input I just clicked Ok and it didn't give me an error message of any sort. It just logged me in.
So there are a no. of issues here:
- Log in shouldn't be tried multiple times automatically if the password is wrong. It should wait for User Input
- The user id that was locked was "my". After I change the User ID, it shouldn't give me a CAPTCHA because it not my user id that is locked that needs unlocking.
- The CAPTCHA should be potent. So the input I give should be properly validated which is not being done in this case. Now this is a special case. but if the CAPTCHA is given it should be validated or it shouldn't be given at all.
- In case there are errors and if the CAPTCHA Service is down, it should not show me the error message as a CAPTCHA.
So my question is how much would you really pay for a software like Google Talk? Yes I know, there is great power in simplicity. And even though Google talk doesn't provide features like great smileys and stuff, it lets you talk. For free, this is good enough. But how much would you really pay for it? Another question that pops in is would you use a software like this for business communication?
As mentioned in one of the posts, Google gives a lot of importance to the cool factor. Would you really pay for a cool software or a software that could be used for business application? Where's the ROI...? People talk a lot about Google being in competition with Microsoft. I don't really think it stands tall enough.
