It's hard to get excited about Google Voice. I'm not so sure anyone should until the company starts putting stats on the table about the number of customers and revenues the project brings in.
The facts, as we know them, are as follows: In July 2007, Google paid $50 million for GrandCentral. One of the few blog postings after the purchase, dated April 22, 2008, "promised a ton of cool new features." It's now March 2009, and the "cool new features" turn out to be 1) Voicemail transcripts 2) Archiving and searching of SMS text messages, and 3) Low-cost international calls.
Google is going to undercut Skype by a couple of cents per minute on L-D, and that's cool?
Maybe the time is right for The Goog to strike because most of the other me-too VoIP players imploded, leaving a relatively clean playing field. Google can subsidize the effort with all that fat cash coming in from its ad revenue.
And maybe Google has a trick or two up its sleeve to scale GrandCentral to move out of individual accounts and into the more lucrative SMB and enterprises spaces - something that would give the Skype major heartburn considering it wants to play in the business world.
But I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid that just because Google is Google it will magically suck in new users to its IP telephony service and take users away from Skype. The guys at Skype have an established a worldwide customer base, a long-term plan to proliferate Skype everywhere from cell phones to HDTV sets for video conferencing, and a full-bore communications plan to let everyone know what it is doing.
Google just buys stuff, lets the programmers tinker with it, and then throws it out in a Darwinian fashion as a beta or preview or whatever you want to call it. On the scale of ad revenues Google generates, voice is a hobby and likely to stay that way relative to the efforts of Skype and Vonage. For Skype, voice revenues are its lifeblood.
If Google buys Vonage or Skype, that would be another story. But I don't think Skype wants to be bought anytime soon.
- Doug [1]
Links:
[1] mailto:doug@fiercemarkets.com