Another “Soft Launch” for Google Voice

Google_logoI’ve written a lot about Google Voice on this site. Today Greg Sterling took his turn on the Local Mobile Search site, here. Greg makes some very good points about the need for Google to do more than a series of “soft launches” for its cloud-based services like Google Voice or Google Checkout.

My belief is that Google introduces its Web services so softly because it can afford to do so. It can gauge the organic demand for selected, hosted Web services and let the market (or at least the geeky development community) decide which ones move to the next level. At the same time it is able to present instances of its productivity suite (Calendar, Docs, Gmail, and Tasks), information/publishing services (News, Reader, Book Reader, Maps, Goog411) and other useful/social services (YouTube, Translate, orkut) in ways that make all of its “properties” potentially more valuable as developers invent more ways to leverage these existing assets. That’s the essence of Recombinant Telephony.

Ultimately, over the next few years, all will be caught up in The Wave.



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