You might be aware, Google Inc. has been making ever more inroads on the “new telephony entrant” front by adding network operator-type stuff to its suite of Internet apps, most recently with the addition of voice chat via Gmail. The Googster now is encroaching on wireless functionality — sort of — with a feature that lets people send text messages to mobile phones directly from Gmail.
The feature actually was launched back in October but quickly disabled because of bugs, but the Internet behemoth said the problems should be fixed now. "A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat," blogged Leo Dirac, a Google product manager.
So you can talk to your peeps from Gmail, video conference from Gmail, IM from Gmail and now, text message from Gmail. Sounds like a whole suite of services that once was the province of carriers and VoIP providers and anyone that does unified communications. But lest traditional telephony folks get too nervous, it’s worth considering this latest SMS feature is available only in the United States, and requires the setup via Gmail Labs of a specific phone number for the wireless user to text back to.
On the other hand, Google’s moves dovetail with the Voice 2.0 phenomenon of making a variety of voice-enabled Web services that are hosted “in the cloud” accessible from any Internet connection, something which has the potential to be very disruptive in the market. Google has been out in the forefront of said cloudiness with its own cloud computing initiatives, and now is loading up ever more services to take advantage of the computing back-end. Google: your new phone company? Maybe someday. Even if they continue to add traditional carrier services, existing operators do have an opportunity in providing the broadband pipes to enable cloud connections, plus QoS, packet prioritization and other network-based value-adds.
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