Question of the Month: Did Apple Really Reject Google Voice? But, as Phone Marketing Insider, I have a different question…
The Blogosphere has been going crazy this month over Apple’s seeming rejection of Google Voice’s iphone application at the end of July. While Apple claimed that the Google app duplicated features on the iphone, articles and opinions on Apple’s true incentives are endless. A great article from the New York Times summarizes the popular take on the issue.
The Times argues, like many others, that Apple’s rejection came as “a heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style,” trying to protect AT&T from Google Voice’s competition. Wired, on July 28th, took a similar approach, and claims to have predicted Apple’s reaction. TechCrunch voiced their outrage in an article titled, “Apple is Growing Rotten to the Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked from App Store.”
Now that Apple has published its responses to the FCC investigation, stating that it never really rejected Google Voice’s app, the blogosphere has another opportunity to investigate. To view the entire response, on Apple’s website, click here, but the bottom line is that the story is not over. Apple says that they are continuing to study the app’s relationship with the iphone user’s experience, but others see their response as pure PR.
What interests me, though, as the Phone Marketing Insider, is actually not whether Apple has in fact rejected the Google app, nor whether they were acting in consultation with AT&T. The significant lesson for phone marketers from this whole controversy is the fact that cloud telephony applications, like Google Voice, are making their way into the public. If Apple doesn’t approve of Google’s app, they’ll find a new way to reach people on their smartphones.
For the phone marketers and salespeople, this talk raises awareness of the new forms of call routing, and questions how automated phone applications will grow alongside traditional telephone line providers. Just a little over a month after Google announced its public invitations to Google Voice (on June 25th), the question is not whether they will reach the smartphone market, but when and how.
The final question for those of us interested in cloud telephony applications is: how will Google Voice’s infiltration into the public change the whole nature of call routing?
Related posts:
- Google Voice Enters the iphone – Through the Web Browser
- Is a Google Picking a Fight with Apple: the Release of Multi-touch on Nexus One
- Apple Approves First VoIP App Over 3G: iCall
- Apple Defines the Order of New Markets: from the iPhone to the iPad
- 5 Reasons Why Teachers (and Other Non-Techies) Love Google Voice
