Signal to Noise

Here’s an interesting piece questioning Google’s lack of improvements to the Grand Central service since acquiring it a while back.  The author asks why nothing has changed with GC since the acquisition.

The trick to understanding Google’s publicity lag for GC is the core technology they use: VoIP.  This technology family has not fully matured, and isn’t likely to be pervasive until somebody, Google, really figures out how to get the final frontier of datacomm applications–realtime media–OFF of traditional transmission mechanisms and ONTO the web. Up until now, VoIP and telephony have remained largely excluded from the Google party, relegated to a climate of inaction where business dictates the preservation of legacy, circuit-switched networks. End-to-end VoIP hasn’t materialized yet, so the penetration of services like Grand Central into mainstream culture has been low. That’s got folks wondering why Google is apparently just sitting on what we in the industry consider to be a gold mine.

So why hasn’t Grant Central become the showpiece many of us expected?  I think I have the answer: the industry isn’t ready.

The opportunity for Google to capitalize on Grand Central might still be ahead of us, not behind us. Grand Central’s core technology is VoIP call-switching.  Software is used to automate this core technology and create a very simple, very useful palette of telephony tools, mostly for directing incoming phone calls to cellphones and SIP agents such as Gizmo Project.

I see Grand Central mashing up with services like searchable voicemail, language translation, Fonolo, which dials phone menus to save time, and things like SwitchVox and Fonality, which provide SIP-based telephony at the desktop.  To Googlize voice, the notions of search and user-preference-driven intuition  have to enter the equation, and Grand Central gives Google a means to this end.  But, I say again, the industry may not be ready.

In the background, Google is doing what it can to ready the industry–making access to the network more ubiquitous, fighting regulation of currently open access mechanisms (primarily radio spectrum), and readying a path to open converged platforms via its Android mobile operating system.  All the while, Google has avoided the nasty temptation to cozy up to the big phone companies, because of their affinity for the status quo.

A little success on each of these fronts could create the perfect storm for GC, just as the desire for cheap advertising and darn good searchability created the perfect storm for Google during Bubble 1.0.