By now, the millions of calls originated by people using the “Call Phone” feature in Gmail has re-established the fact that people love to make free phone calls. The question in my mind is “What took so long for Google to introduce this feature?” When the company acquired the assets and engineering team of Gizmo5 back in November of 2009, the laws of RC (Recombinant Communications) dictated that they could have embedded phone origination features in a matter of days or weeks.

Instead, eight months and a Skype IPO later, the “Call Phone” feature dramatizes the truly disruptive nature of Google’s telephony strategy. It’s no surprise at all that the service reached the million call milestone in less than 24 hours. That is just a fraction of the overall call volume on public networks and we all know how quickly people discover “free” ways to carry out communications that cost a nominal fee from alternative service providers (Directory Assistance served as the crash test dummy for the fee-to-free migration pattern).

If Gmail, Google Voice and Google Chat users stay true to form on the Google’s information freeway, we will see steady migration from alternative services like Skype Out and the numerous calling card services that charge pennies per minute. The steady improvement of the “Google App” on mobile phones and integration of Google’s library of applications with Android, Chrome and HTML5 program environments will further lower the barriers for users to stay inside Google while originating (within the confines of North America, at least).

Meanwhile, the steady improvement of voice control carries on, It makes the notion of free, mobile, speech-based search, find and communicate exclusively from Google (perhaps with an assist from Verizon Wireless) a formidable reality.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Google Voice, Cloud-based telephony, mobile speech, Recombinant Communications, VoIP