Chuck Reynolds

Google Voice

It isn’t news that the home phone is going by the wayside.  I’ve had the conversation about home phones with a number of people as I often contemplate getting one, particularly when I see cheap plans or twists to the classic home phone.  But, aside from ordering pizza, or making mundane calls while at home I don’t see a need for a home phone.  One colleague and I were discussing this and he said he maintained his home phone so that his kids had a number. While it is not “their” number, it is able to be given to the schools, groups, programs, etc that they attend and participate in.

This led me to wonder how my brother and sister-in-law are going to broach the subject, particularly since they work so hard to have equality in managing their kids’ lives and schedules and the kids are both under two. When one’s cell phone number is the “home” number it would be the first to be called – and thus lead to more requests and responsibility falling on that partner. One solution can be GrandCentral (soon to be Google Voice.) This central number rings both phones solving the problem but doesn’t require a home phone (of course, when the kids want to start talking to their friends it is a different matter entirely.) Google is vying to be the bridge between the necessity of having a home phone and living a purely mobile life.

Another great use of GrandCentral is that you can move without having to get a new number. This was my intent with getting my GrandCentral number – the plan was to share the 412 (GrandCentral) number with new colleagues and yet still be able to keep my 703 (cell phone) number. No need for Pittsburghers to think I am a transient sole and no need to change my phone number. Obviously the purpose of GrandCentral was not to solve my problem, so there were gaps and holes that, despite being an early adopter I couldn’t live with such as the lack of SMS (looking forward to upgrading for SMS.)

These are great things to use GrandCentral for now, but what interests me more is to see how Google is going to use Voice later. Google said that rather than launching hundreds of products that lack any coherent strategy they are working to integrate all of their products. This isn’t anything new, businesses have been integrating and streamlining since IT began.  What I believe is Google will continued the trend of trickling down enterprise solutions to the consumer market.

Business technology always evolves down to the consumer, phones, Internet, email, PDAs all have “trickled” down to the consumer after wide adoption in the enterprise. We can see this happening more and more with PDAs being targeted to the consumer, starting with the Blackberry “non-numbered” series such as the Pearl, Curve and then Storm. It continued with the iPhone, Palm Centreno, and soon the Palm Pre. One technology that is taking hold in the workplace is the integration of VoIP, email and all communications. Voicemails come up in email, automatic forwarding to PDAs, easier conference calling, etc.

I believe that is what Google is trying to do with Google Voice. It was not the goal of GrandCentral, but in Google’s typical fashion they reworked the solution from the ground up and are re-introducing it to solve a different problem based on the same technology. Google Voice will integrate email, voice, SMS and IM. If you ascribe to this belief then Google moving into mobile phones with Android makes even more sense. Google uses their products to promote each other and show advertising, I do not believe that we’ll be hearing a “brought to you by Google” message while making calls, but if GMail and Voice integrate the transcribed Voicemail  we will be ads ads right next to the transcripts of our voice mail.

Where do you think Google is going to take Voice?