There’s been a lot of buzz recently about Google Voice, which is finally sending out invites to the many who have registered to participate in the private beta it’s running. But one thing has struck me about Google Voice during all this hubbub: it’s so 20th century!
Sure – Google Voice offers a variety of attractive features, like forwarding calls to various phones, visual voicemail, voicemail transcription and so on. But these have been available to some extent for years. Find-me, follow-me services and simul-ring services have been available on PSTN and VoIP systems for quite some time. Visual voicemail is becoming increasingly prevalent on high-end smartphones, and voicemail transcription services are common with VoIP offerings and will become increasingly so elsewhere. The web interface for all of this is somewhat innovative, but not ultimately hugely different from VoIP offerings in the market already.
The striking thing, though, is that all this is delivered over the PSTN, and in fact relies on circuit switched telephony to work. Google Voice doesn’t provide you with a phone or even a VoIP client – it is entirely a service for connecting your existing landline or mobile phones together. Yes, there’s some VoIP in the back end tying it all together, but this is the telephony version of Google News – a nice modern-looking front end enabled in the backend by a bunch of legacy services. This is ironic, since Google has had a VoIP client for quite a few years now in the form of Google Talk and the chat function buried in Gmail. But it’s completely unintegrated with Google Voice and the two seem to be developing entirely separately.
One of the key barriers to large uptake of Google Voice is the absence of number portability: the ability to switch an existing number to the service. Without that, you’ll have to notify everyone of your new number, and remind them constantly when they keep forgetting (and pray like heck that the service works out, or you’ll be telling them all to switch back). Number portability, which some have suggested may be coming to Google Voice soon, would solve that problem. But it also raises a unique issue: with regular number portability, you’re shutting off your old phone entirely, but with Google Voice you’ll still need a number to route the calls too, since it doesn’t provide an endpoint of its own. I’m not sure most carriers are set up to allow you to port a number off their network while maintaining the phone line: in essence they’ll have to issue a new number, which they may not want to do, and which their customer service reps may not know how to do (or want to do). What then? Will Google have a massive customer service issue on its hands when it launches portability? And all this with a service that has no real revenue stream at this point?
Perhaps they’ll solve that issue long-term by adding a VoIP client so that it provides its own endpoint and you can indeed cancel the service you had previously, but then it’s become something rather different – a VoIP client, something people have resisted for all sorts of reasons (some of them quite good). And I really don’t think they want to go the ATA / primary line replacement service – not least because that gets you into taxes and fees territory. And I’m not even going to get into how they make money here when there’s no real opportunity for advertising.
Overall, though, Google Voice in many ways feels very last century – a service that merely forwards calls between various old fashioned phones with a zippy interface. It’s getting lots of buzz, but as I noted earlier this week in a tweet, any closed beta from a well known company will do that (think of Gmail). I’m not convinced this is the telco killer some are making it out to be, even with the new mobile apps.
