Summary
Google Voice will provide more flexibility than any other similar service offering in the near future, at a price that no one can beat... "Free". How this will trickle down through the rest of the communication industry may not be readily plain, but the ramifications are huge.
Analysis
Having led the call center consulting, CRM, and tradional voice carrier industry for HP, and with over 15 years in the voice/data communciation market, I have seen the growth of VoIP solutions infringe, then enhance the play of established companies in the industry. Google is about to rev that trend in many ways that some companies may not foresee.
For example, while there is a solid and stable market of call recording vendors in place now, and clients who will need call recording in the relative future this may not be the case for long. When every call made can be done via the Google Voice platform the special niche benefits of these software company's applications may not be so special anymore.
With every call logged, annotated, and flagged as a .wav file that can be downloaded, forwarded, duplicated, stored, and backed up for later retrieval... all of the traditional claim to fame of classic call recording offerings from the likes of NICE, Witness, and even smaller niche players like OnviSource will become "expensive alternatives" to living within the free Google Voice environment. All these specialist software vendors hold as an ace card is the sorting and selection retrieval systems they provide... but wait, managing huge sums of data is what made Google so well placed to begin with... how long will it take for them to develop the add-on interfaces and applets to allow the management of all your calls, right from the desktop?
Additionally, with the strong expected "point of presence" appeal of Google Voice, companies who were banking on the magic of letting users determine how, when, and where they are reachable becomes a moot point.
After establishing a universal phone number assigned by Google, users can then tie in their home phone, cell phone, pager, and PC accounts all to that same primary number. Then using your PC and Google Voice, users can then establish rules and priority for which path should be connected first, based on the time of day, day of the week, or physical location of the user. How will companies formerly selling point of presence applications survive, when you can get 95% of the features they offer, for 100% less cost?
Application developers better start looking now at ways to dovetail into the oncoming path of Google Voice. If not, they may find themselves like other famous software companies such as Ashton-Tate DBase, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and WordPerfect which all were once dominant software applications in their respective market space, but today find themselves as either market oddities forced to survive past their legitimate usefulness, or as the brunt of technology trivia questions.
Google is coming... fast and hard... while end-users will have to suffer minor learning curves and possible feature shortages in the early versions, we all can see with our own eyes that Google has created a great SaaS platform for mapping, 3D drawing, social networking, and email use. Now they move into the next layer of communication by taking on the last virgin bastion - the huge voice and data convergence.
While other firms like Vonnage, Skype and a host of others have tip-toed into that space, none had the market clout, devoted developer base, and the goodwill of so much open architecture to drive market penetration at such a rocket-like rate which Google can muster.
I would not want to be an application software developer in the way of this speeding train... so you better find a way to get on it before it runs you over!
