Google's 2007 acquisition spree has continued, with the acquisition of GrandCentral - a service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. Interestingly, Google says they bought GrandCentral because it fits well with their other services that "enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users." In other words, this is yet another Web Office play from Google.
In today's increasingly virtual and fragmented workforce, a service such as GrandCentral is an ideal complement to other Web Office tools such as GTalk, Gmail and Docs&Spreadsheets. As Josh Catone wrote in his post Rolling Your Own Online Office, the key to a successful distributed team is communication. And GrandCentral is a service that makes telephone communication much easier and gives more control to the user - e.g. you can set rules as to what calls you accept and when, and even hear why someone is calling before taking the call.
I think this will also ruffle some feathers at Skype/eBay. I use Skype a lot - and I have a Skype-In San Francisco phone number, because even though I live in New Zealand the center of my work existence is Silicon Valley (and 50% of R/WW readers come from the US, compared to just 0.8% from my home country). Skype-In is a handy service, although the call quality tends to be poor. But GrandCentral appears to offer a lot of compelling features, which may in time make my Skype-In number redundant.
Unfortunately, right now the GrandCentral service is restricted to those who have a U.S. telephone number and also the service isn't accepting new users at this time. However you can "reserve" a number by submitting your name and email address. I can't wait to try it out. Game on Skype! This is the sort of functionality we'll expect in online telephony services from now on, so Skype needs to step up to the plate and compete with GrandCentral on features.
What's more, once again Google has positioned itself at the leading edge of innovation in an emerging Web Office market segment. They did it with wikis (JotSpot), online word processing (Writely), email (Gmail), RSS (Feedburner) and perhaps with presentation software too.
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Hi Richard, it's fantastic news indeed. I am especially interested in how the Google services and apps will integrate with GrandCentral's service. I've written about my ideas on the matter at YashLabs - "Google Telecom, Hello!":
Best
Posted by: Josh Nursing | July 2, 2007 4:53 PMThe psychological barrier to consolidation
Consolidation will happen the question is who will have the best desensitizing psychological marketing model.
It is obvious that what we are seeing today is a passing stage. People have to maintain 5 social networks, 3 IM contact lists, 4 Virtual world personalities, 4 email accounts and 3 phone numbers.
Consolidation is a burning need and delivering it is not a technological issue. The barrier is a psychological one.
Consolidating your identities means giving one hell of control to a single player and doing this is far from trivial.
Every person that will face the "Press here for one identity" button will immediately feel the angel and the devil on his shoulders.
The devil will say:
"Go on Avi, aren’t you tired of all this mess. Think how easy everything will be from now on"
The angel will answer:
"Buy Avi didn't you read 1884, sure it's been 25 years and nothing happened but who says that the BIG BROTHER isn't really out there?"
Well most people will have a really hard time deciding what to do. Overcoming this psychological barrier will be hard to the point of impossible.
I think that initiatives like YADIS that aim to create a decentralized infrastructure for unique web ID (Something similar to getting your own URL) have a good chance at becoming the standard.
Also as VOIP telephony expands URLs can be used as the basis for a single identity.
I own ‚Äúwww.avich.com‚Ä? I have no problem with this becoming my one stop identity for phone/email/IM/virtual world etc.
When thinking of Google’s chance of becoming a one stop ID we should remember the .NET password attempt by Microsoft and how it failed.
I think that acquisitions like GrandCentral can damage Google, in the psychological level), more than they can help on the business level and Google can find themselves labeled “Big brother" (before they completed there efforts and really became one, and that will be a major problem for them).
Posted by: Avi Charkham | July 2, 2007 11:28 PMRichard, next time you travel to the US, simply send your application with a fake tel number (or use a proxy in the US for it).
Once you get your GrandCentral number, delete the phone number you gave, and leave it blank (international numbers are not accepted), or give your US SkypeIn number.
I've heard of people doing this and being able to have a workable number that works perfect as voice mail to email .... :)
I am sooo looking forward getting my GrandCentral number in Gtalk .....
Posted by: hombrelobo | July 3, 2007 2:47 AMHi, Richard.
Posted by: Lemon | July 4, 2007 7:30 AMIt's a Great news.
Hey Richard! I'm in your same boat, just a little further south in ChCh. I've got a US VoIP number from www.lingo.com that I brought with me when I moved here from the States. I love it—it's like a little US-territory embassy in my office. Yet you say GrandCentral offers compelling features that may make your Skype-In redundant. What are they? Will they make my Lingo redundant? I love my Lingo! I don't want it to be redundant!
Cheers,
Posted by: Kaila Colbin | July 4, 2007 10:53 AMKaila
I’m an Executive Consultant at IT Consulting company in Central New Jersey. I reviewed this thoroughly for a client last weekend. I found the services of GrandCentral to be either redundant or frivolous and the overhead to setup and support it to be absolutely insane. Read my very through review:
http://www.the-digital-life.com/2007/07/21/grandcentral-grand-waste-of-time/
Posted by: The Digital Life | July 21, 2007 12:38 PM