Calls from Gmail: Too Ordinary?

When Google’s Gmail came out with unlimited storage, the price of emailing dropped to zero. Google has a solid reputation for breaking barriers and bringing the market with it. With Google Earth solving crimes and Google Maps overtaking the once dominant Mapquest, it seems everything Google creates is an unstoppable force, especially last month when Google launched Google Instant. Google Instant is a new form of Google’s search engine that updates your search as you type, which has already dramatically changed the view of search engines. However, Google’s new Gmail feature of “Calls from Gmail” is not up to par. Free online calling is nothing new, Skype already has dominated the market for it and Gmail’s version offers no advantages. Gmail cannot place video calls, and overseas calls still come at a cost. The user interface is not as simple and easy as the rest of its products and there aren’t customizable features such as ringtones. However some think that Calls from Gmail is quite innovative and lives up to the standards of the company. With the decreasing rate of home phones, internet routed calls are filling in the space, according to Farhad Manjoo, and Google’s model is quite the competition.

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post predicts that Calls from Gmail will have the same impact on the telephone market that Gmail itself had on the email market, that it will drop the prices of phone calls, maybe even exonerating the cost completely. However, if that were true, it would have already happened as a result of Skype. Plus, comparing phone calls to emails is like comparing apples to oranges, they don’t line up. Emails becoming free did not cause an issue because the email users were already paying for their connection to the internet itself, and so there was money funding the major email websites to carryon. Whereas the cost of calls cannot disappear because without money to fund a telephone connection, there will be no telephone networks still in business to connect a call. While this may be the future of communication and considered a good thing to rid the world of telephone companies ripping off their customers and to fill it with internet routed calls, this change can not happen for at least another ten to twenty years to bridge the gap between technologically challenged and inclined people.

I personally don’t believe that Calls from Google will have a “revolutionary” impact on technology. Voice chat was introduced a while ago and Google missed out on adding something special to one-up their competitors. They should have aimed to create a system that operates through a more home-oriented system to bring the house phone right back into the living room, such as a TV. If Calls from Gmail were a video interactive calling system with a simple television hook up, they would be currently leading the market. However, they simply put out the most basic and unoriginal programming, leaving them short of upholding their innovative reputation.

http://theweek.com/article/index/206611/gmail-phone-revolutionary