What’s the saying? Death by 1000 pricks?
Telecom service providers are certainly keeping close tabs on Google as a competitor, but it often seems the search giant hasn’t really made one big move that would signal its intentions. They’ve mucked around with spectrum, tweaked telcos at the FCC about DPI and other developments and launched services that seem not-quite-mainstream like Google Talk or Google Voice.
But those pricks add up, don’t they?
The latest:
- This week Google made it possible for its Gmail users to retrieve SMS delivered via Google Voice in their email inboxes and made it possible to retrieve voice mail transcriptions and the audio messages themselves via Gmail too. Once again, nothing overwhelming but another few steps down a true unified communications path that telcos, with their giant head start, seem loathe to pursue.
- I would say more interestingly (but again, below the radar), Google today said it plans to add billing and subscription capabilities to its Google Checkout payment platform, initially targeting the newspaper industry as customers. Tapping the dying newspaper industry certainly adds a snore factor to the announcement, but this is a trojan horse if we’ve ever seen one. Telecom service providers hold their customer relationships — including billing relationships — as sacrosanct and a key differentiator over competitors. Well don’t look now but here comes Google adding a billing relationship to the untold other ways it now interacts with consumers (not to mention content providers, on the other end of this two-sided value chain). Watch your back, the pin pricks keep on coming.
