If you’ve been keeping an eye on the VoIP market, or Google, or Apple/iPhone, then you have almost certainly seen the kerfuffle over the release of a Google Voice iPhone app and it’s subsequent removal from the iPhone AppStore. If not then the web is full of this week’s hot story, and a quick seach will find you more than you ever want to know.
I have no intention of adding to the mountain of opinion already out there on this particular story. My interest, though, has been piqued by the almost universal assumption in every article that Google Voice is a groundbreaking new service. I must mention one of the people I follow on twitter, @GarrettSmith, as a notable exception to this view. To quote a recent, pithy, tweet of his
I can’t believe Google Voice is a trending topic. It’s a virtual number service…
Quite right, Garrett. It’s a virtual number service that has two things going for it:
- It’s Google’s service…so you can be pretty sure it’s going to be around a while.
- It’s free.
The much lauded features of Google Voice are available elsewhere (Ureach springs to mind), albeit at a price as no-one else has the cash in the bank to offer a free service from scratch. Alternatively, using a provider like Voiptalk, a kludgier and more manual version of GV can be implemented for the cost of a phone number. And if you already have an Asterisk server, then you can do everything GV can do, and more.
Will it succeed? To be honest, it already seems to be doing quite well in it’s US-only stage. Expanding beyond that, particularly into Europe, will raise interesting questions about such topics as the storage of data (i.e.voicemail) outside the EU. Something that Spinvox has fallen foul of recently.
GV also fills out the Google communications offering, and will no doubt integrate more and more with the other aspects incluing Google Apps, of which I am a big fan. I just wish that everyone didn’t buy into the hype quite so much.
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