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.

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At VoiceCon still today. Two more keynotes early in the day: this time IBM and Cisco. Two more variations on the themes from yesterday. The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys – how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off. With the rest, you’re always left wondering how much of what they present is real and how much is just vision and no more.

The Cisco keynote was classic Cisco – bigger and bolder than anything anyone else did, and an attempt to blow the rest out of the water. A TelePresence roundtable discussion between CMO Sue Bostrom, CEO John Chambers, Al Gore and British journalist Lawrence McGinty. I was only able to stay for half an hour but got the gist. The main thrust was climate change, so in some ways it fit nicely with Lou D’Ambrosio’s assertion that UC can save the US economy, and Pall’s suggestion that UC can transform lives and businesses. John Chambers has certainly signed up as a card-carrying member of the save the planet brigade and it looks like he’s signed Cisco up for the program too.

My conversations today confirmed several of my own thoughts. Democratization of UC is all very well as a long term project, but it’s premature at this stage as a concrete goal. Cisco and Microsoft have work to do in order to get their sales people to embrace the vision their executives articulate around collaboration and interoperability. There’s a sense that enterprises are taking a breather at the moment from pushing forward with UC while they wait to see what happens next on the vendor side. They need convincing that the solutions in the market today are mature enough to deploy, and that there is a real business case for UC, probably for individual departments or other smaller user groups in the first instance.

But the UC train rolls on, and all the major companies are planning future releases to provide more functionality, better integration and a broader set of capabilities. In time, we’ll get to first the aristocratic approach and then to democracy itself, but it’s becoming clearer and clear that all this is a long-term project.

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I’m at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando at the moment, for the third year straight. We spent a few days as a family in the Tampa area before I headed over here, and caught some fun Yankees games at Legends Field.

The conference itself has evolved in interesting ways during the time I’ve been coming. Two years ago, Cisco made its big Unified Communications launch, and caught everyone by surprise. As I spent time with the other IP telephony vendors on that occasion, they were all scrambling to say that they had been doing UC for some time already and did everything Cisco was announcing it would do. But I came away predicting that Cisco’s entry into the market would completely change things – and it did. Their sheer size and marketing muscle took UC from a non-issue to the top of the IPT agenda, and has kept it there since.

A year ago, Microsoft made its big announcement around UC, with Jeff Raikes staking out the company’s vision for UC, and a prediction that the price of the PBX would halve as software-based communications took over from the old hardware-centric model. Between Microsoft and Cisco, the UC hype machine has only accelerated since then.

This morning’s keynotes came from Lou D’Ambrosio of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. The theme that was common to both of them was what D’Ambrosio described as the “democratization of UC” and Pall described as empowering all users, not just the few. He used the analogy of attempting to reduce global warming by making every Rolls Royce a hybrid to argue that providing UC to a handful of employees was unlikely to transform any business. D’Ambrosio took his electoral metaphor further by sharing clips of the remaining presidential candidates ostensibly endorsing Avaya’s vision for UC – a clever and entertaining move. He also asked the audience which candidate they favored – Obama and McCain got roughly equally loud cheers in this most unscientific of straw polls, while Clinton merited barely a smattering of claps.

The democracy vision feels a little premature. It is true that in the IPT world, although many companies have deployed IP to some extent, most have not deployed it to all users, and therefore extending it to the masses is the next logical step. But UC is still at least one step behind. It hasn’t been deployed at all in most companies, and the first step is very much to establish an aristocracy of UC power users rather than to launch straight into a democracy, to stretch D’Ambrosio’s analogy. Most companies are unconvinced of the merits of UC and the return on investment they will achieve, and so want to try a few pilots and trials, just as they did with IPT. That is where the focus should be today, with democracy following much later.

Pall’s presentation at least provided a compelling argument for why eventually empowering all users with UC was a worthy vision. He talked about the transformative power of UC – both in companies and in people’s lives. To illustrate the latter point he shared the example of a hospital which has used Microsoft’s Roundtable videoconferencing solution to allow a young cancer patient to virtually attend school from his hospital room. He gave IT managers a reason (or several) why enabling UC was more than just switching on a few cool features for some power users, and encouragement to see its full potential. Again, I think the fulfilment is several years away, and this vision should not distract from the reality of the first few tough wins today, but there’s no harm in pinning up the democracy goal as a long-term objective.

Looking forward to more interesting speeches and meetings tomorrow.

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