Google VoIP goes live, but it still has a few tricks up its sleeves

After months of rumor spotting and connecting the dots, the long awaited Google VoIP offering has arrived. The results are somewhat less exciting when you think about it. With the flip of a switch Google has simply added a new function, a link to click, within their already successful Gmail platform. The change adds a much deeper functionality than the surface would imply, essentially launching Google Voice to all users of the Gmail platform in the coming days and placing VoIP on the desktops of "hundreds of millions" of Gmail users (according to Gmail product manager Todd Jackson.)

Apart from making VoIP synonomous with Googling in today's tech vocabulary, a few parts of the solution are still missing. For one, the business VoIP that we know has to be coming soon is still not out. Google has said that the business VoIP offering wasn't ready yet but that they'd be interested in offering such a service in the future. Over the past few weeks numerous pundits have chimed in about Google's strategic domination of the UCC field. Small businesses that already use Google for their email and office applications are surely salivating at the option to end their phone bills someday.

Additionally, the mobile segment of this new VoIP offering is also not quite ready for primetime. With its Android operating system nearing ubiquity in the mobile sector--each plugged right in to a Gmail account--it's quite possible that with another flip of a software switch, Google would dominate the mobile VoIP world overnight as well.

If the service proves as valuable as Gmail has become to users, the need for other desktop and mobile VoIP products might be eliminated. Such a release is a huge threat to software based VoIP companies who've already invested time and energy into their services. Google's userbase is bound to overlap with theirs which means company's better be able to show how their service is better, cheaper, more private or otherwise more innovative than the automatically installed Google version of VoIP.

It will be interesting to see how consumers adopt the new service and the shakeup that might occur in the desktop VoIP sector. -Mike