Google Takes on Skype
August 30th, 2010Discussing Skype earlier this month, I thought it would be fitting to discuss the recent moves made by Google to take on the Internet communications company.
Last Wednesday, Google made the announcement that you’d be able to make phone calls right from your Gmail account. By Thursday morning, the feature was available across the United States to Gmail users. In simple terms, it allows you to call any phone number right from your computer. As of this writing, calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for the rest of 2010, and they have a full list of rates to other countries throughout the world. Also, you can integrate your Google Voice number to your gmail account to allow it to be the outbound number people see, or to receive calls from that number in your Gmail account.
I also don’t think it is farfetched to say that Google made this announcement strategically after Skype announced their long awaited IPO. But personally, I’m not sure it will be enough to disrupt what Skype is currently doing. In late 2009, Gmail had around 176 million users. Around that same time, Skype was at about 521 million users. Skype has been focusing on improving and making this technology as good as it can be, something Google did itself with Search. Because of that, I still think it will be the leader when push comes to shove in this Internet communications tug-of-war. It’s also important to remember that Google has had some misses lately. Buzz started off with a PR firestorm and Google Wave never seemed to be the game-changer they had promised.
It will be interesting to see when Skype’s IPO occurs to see what affect this may have on their value projections. If nothing else, I hope this helps users in the long-run by each company working to make the service as good as possible and keeping the costs down.
