Alec Saunders: Grand Central acquisition shows Google's hand.

Alec Saunders writes on the potential Grand Central acquisition by Google

After all the attention that Grand Central has received, the rumour on the street is that they may have been acquired by Google for a cool $50 million. If true, it reveals a lot more of Google's hand than we've seen previously.  Until now, they've studiously avoided any knd of service which connects them directly with the PSTN.  GoogleTalk famously relies on third parties to provide origination and termination services.  With Grand Central in the mix, however, that would no longer be true.  Grand Central's message of One Phone Number, for life also fits nicely with Google's aspirations to be your one mailbox, and online identity resource.

I've been using Grandcentral for a number of months, and I've been telling just about everyone I know about how wonderful a service they provide.  It will be interesting to see Google's approach, will they market the service at the masses, or will they roll into the suite Google Apps (or both)?

I wonder if the telcos realize what a threat Grandcentral is to their business models simply because it makes the phone number from your service provider unimportant.  I'm assuming many people stick with their current providers simply because they want to avoid the hassle of changing phone numbers (and because number portability doesn't always work, or isn't always an option).

BTW - it was great finally meeting Alec in person at Enterprise 2.0!

Comments

[Joseph]

Phone number portability is widespread and usually fast and easy.

[Irwin Lazar]

Thanks for the comments Joseph. I tried to port my Cingular cell phone number to Sprint-Nextel about a year ago and was told by Sprint-Nextel that they couldn't do the port, the reason they gave was that they were out of number space, or something to that effect.

Previously, when I ported a verizon number to AT&T it got screwed up along the way because someone fat-fingered my address, which took about two weeks to resolve.

By separating out the number from the service, I avoid all that hassle, plus I can have a single phone number that rings anywhere I want it to - whether it be cell, home, work, or even Skype.

[matt lambert]

Hi Irwin. It occurs to me that number portability could also be phrased as 'a self updating address book'. If users are abstracting the number from the device they receive a call at, several times a day let alone when they change devices every couple of years - then I think this is significant.

The difference between this and other similar services available in the past might be the trust that ownership by a big company could generate. A single number from a company that goes bust next year is worthless.

Similarly, the ability to scale globally and offer seamless fail over with cheap computing has long been google's real competitive advantage. I'd better stop now.