Not content with dominating search, email, maps and online video, this week
Google announced that, for its American customers at least, it will also be
attempting to usurp the telephone.
Within days of rolling out the option to call Google contacts' phones from
within its Gmail service, the search giant revealed that more than a million
people had already used the service, which it is expecting to be driven in
large part by bargain rates for international calls. But for consumers, it's
another step along the road to the idea of one number that can reach you
wherever you are, rather than separate ones for mobile, home and work.
The move puts Google in direct competition with Skype, whose forthcoming IPO may now be looking somewhat less attractive, but it also marks a new evolution in the connectivity of services; the web browser, on a phone or a computer, is becoming the window via which consumers can view everyone they know. In due course it's likely, too, that the idea of dialling a number on a landline phone will be as unusual as actually dialling one on a mobile.
Indeed, with Google's existing American service, Google Voice, the idea of differentiating between one number for mobile and landline already seems increasingly antiquated. Just as there is one Facebook profile, one main email address, so too the integration of services looks set to mean one phone number will ring through to the most appropriate mobile, desk phone or computer.
Robin Murdoch, consultancy Accenture's lead on internet, says that Google's step is "evolutionary rather than revolutionary - what they've done is integrated the voice service they've already got much more tightly into Gmail. But the trend is what's more interesting and important: it's the increasingly unified tools that websites are constructing which offer a range of ways to communicate all in one place."
That means, according to Murdoch, that the appearance of technological barriers
will start to diminish. "Consumers increasingly are going to lose the
sense of whether they're doing something through a web browser or
through a dedicated app or programme," he says. "Where the browser
ends and the app begins will become much harder to discern."
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
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