Google Voice has been finally (re)launched in the typical google manner of a closed invite-only beta. This is similar to how Google released Gmail. This somewhat closed process, and the limited easy to find descriptions of how it all fits together don’t really help. However ars technica has published a nice overview article that explains what it does quite comprehensively. It doesn’t quite explain how things work on the outbound side - e.g. where Google Voice substitutes your Voice number for the number of the phone you are calling from in other people’s callerID systems - but it does explain the features and what they do.

For the most part these features sound like the ones you get from a very high-end PBX which has been outfitted with speech to text voicemail handling and a bunch of other bells and whistles. However Voice works for individuals not companies and it is, currently, free. Unless Google figures out a way to make users get ads on the system I don’t see how it can possibly remain free unless the purpose of Google Voice is to kill the voice revenue of major operators and/or the IP PBX market. However it is quite possibly a service that I would be willing to pay money for and I suspect others would too, hence I will not be at all surprised if Google starts offering monthly subscriptions.

One thing is for sure, it won’t fly well in Europe or many other places outside the USA. At least one of it’s major features - the ability to redirect calls to a cellphone - will cost google serious amounts of money since, outside the US, calls to cellphones are significantly higher than calls to landlines. On the other hand if Google offers a subscription model where the subscriber pays for cell phone minutes then it could end up finally killing the rip-off roaming charges that many mobile subscribers gripe about. All a traveller would need to do is buy a pre-pay SIM in his new country and tell Google to forward calls to that SIM.

All of the features seem to come from an Internet view of the phone system. Essentially Google Voice adds a layer of virtualization to the phone system so that users have one number but depending on their mood, who is calling etc., callers get different service - including a fake “this number out of service” message for people you really don’t want to talk to. One suspects it wouldn’t be too hard for Google to extend this so that call forwarding would include forwarding to/from VOIP services like GoogleTalk (or Skype).

Finally I have to say that some of the call-forwarding by group and voicemail features would actually be interesting for pure IP services. If Google Voice could add some kind of chat feature (i.e. integrate Google talk) then this would quite possibly kill Skype and many other IM applications.

The Google IO conference is providing a host of interesting announcements. One that is currently getting a good deal of coverage is “Google Wave“. Of course we have to see what actually shows up but what it looks like is a bunch of snazzy Web2.0 AJAXy (with added HTML 5!!!) frontends and tools to a wiki. This is not necessarily a bad thing - wikis tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and also very poor at handling anything other than raw text - but a jazzed up Wiki doesn’t sound quite as revolutionary as perhaps Google would like us to think Wave is.

On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.

The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.

The problem with Web 2.0 and “cloud computing” has always been that sometimes you just don’t have internet connectivity. Hitherto most previous attempts at server-centric computing have failed. Enough critical users are on the road enough of the time that server only solutions have failed - remember Oracle’s doomed efforts or a decade ago? The same potential problem has hit web 2.0 applications as well. Salesforce.com has a dedicated offline mode and synchronization method for example and many other web 2.0 applications simply don’t work offline. This obviously limits their use in an increasingly mobile world.

However now the price of serious amounts of memory and storage (flash drives at a few Euros/dollars/swiss francs/pounds per gigabyte and gigabytes of DRAM similarly priced) means that we ought to be able to cache “most recently used” stuff locally and rely on the cloud as a repository of the rest. Until recently all this was irrelevant because the only platform we could use was the laptop with its large hard disk, Windows OS, Microsoft Office suite and comparatively limited battery life. Given the full service Windows OS and Office suite there really wasn’t much incentive in Web 2.0 / cloud versions of basic office productivity software.

Now, however, we have the netbook. Netbooks are frequently linux based and hence don’t have Microsoft Outlook/ Word etc. They also have less memory/storage compared to today’s laptops (perhaps about the same as was common 3-5 years ago) and most important of all they cost a LOT less. They also weigh a lot less and are thus ideal for business trips. Their real drawback though is that they are underpowered and so when back in the office the user wants his real computer - and thus faces the “Sync” challenge.

This combination means that ideal solution is some kind of cloud computing with offline storage. And Google is now able to offer this for Gmail accounts. Not only that but it offers “flaky” mode support for travellers with intermittent internet access. As someone who was recently in that situation I can say that this looks like a real winner.

It may also be the bullet that kills Microsoft. But that is the subject of a separate post