What's Google up to with Voice and other toys?

I caught up with Boyd Peterson, analyst at Grail Research, after he got in touch with me to share his thoughts on Google Voice this week. Google's Grand Central reboot has been a hot topic of late, and Google's announcement of a Google Voice app [1] for Android and BlackBerry smartphones to address performance concerns only stoked the flames.

But while bloggers and pundits flog every detail about Google Voice, Peterson remains an avid contrarian about the service's eventual revenue generation.

He told me that in 1997, when he was an analyst with Yankee Group, they used to have a slide in their deck about IP communications that called consumer-facing unified communications "The $0 billion market." He says the slide still has relevance today, because as neat and interesting as some features in unified communications may be, he doesn't think they really alter employee or consumer behaviors that much, certainly not to the point of demanding large expenditures to enable it.

But Peterson also wondered, as I do as well, if Google might be able to leverage its size and reach to make Google Voice a winning product.

Peterson doesn't think that Google will fully launch Google Voice as a product at all, at least at first, instead choosing to let lead users find kinks and then make modifications to the project as user behavior around it becomes clear. That's exactly what Google has done around Gmail, for instance, rolling out new features as users make the case for their inclusion, but certainly not rushing to get the updates out the door. Hey, it's free, right?

Peterson thinks Google will open Voice up to developers in keeping with past product launches, enabling innovation without costly investment. He thinks Google's main objective with Voice and a host of other communication acquisitions is to control the interface, not the experience. I tend to agree that Google's hands-off (but eyes on) approach to these services lends itself to success with consumers, but I also think that Google may have a far grander vision when it comes to IP comm.

Google has managed to buy or develop a group or company that serves each of the usual UC feature sets, and I'm talking voice, presence, email, chat, video, video chat, and collaboration.

Could Google eventually meld these offerings, combining Google Voice, Gchat and status updates, Gmail, YouTube and Google Wave functionality into the ultimate consumer IP communications hub?

Sure, the infrastructure would need to improve and significant investment and product integration would need to occur for anything resembling this idea to come to fruition. But with loads of cash on hand, one of the fastest cash-generating businesses in the world, and a gigantic beachhead into consumer thought process, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.

This would fit with Peterson's theory too, because Google might not make, or even try to make, a dime upfront from such a product. But with its ability to sell targeted ads around anything and everything IP, you can be sure it will find a way to get paid on the back end for its "generosity." It might remain a $0 billion industry on the surface, but Google could rake in the cash from its insights into usage patterns across the media it enables.

It's just a thought, and I know it's a bit of a stretch, so let me know what you think.

- Pete [2]
@fiercevoip [3]