Google Voice and FaceTime – Why the Carriers Are Losing Their Voice

Because... carriers are at least as ass-backwards when it comes to tech as the media industry is?

The first slightly-interested part(y|ies) to come along with a couple decent ideas and enough scale to actually bring it to enough people to make it useful have caused major upheaval because phone companies seem to think we've barely entered the digital age.

Think about it: you have voice mail as a sad, low quality version of your old answering machine, with no new tricks, and you can't save them anywhere else. You have text messages, which are incredibly limited and cost thousands of times the data transfer cost. You have a phone number list on your phone that probably maxes out at 1000 (or fewer), might search something aside from the name, and you pay a premium for the ability to back it up yourself with crappy tools, or for them to transfer it to another phone in their system once. I can have up to 3 alarms on my phone. I'm charged up the wazoo for horrible pre-made ring tones. No voice recording (memos). No call recording. No integration of any kind with my computer (except sending / receiving up to 10 v-cards at a time via bluetooth). What was the last device you've had in the past 5 years that you could say any of that about, much less one which costs as much as your phone.

All of which is partially solved by "proper" smart phones like Android and iPhone, which run software (/hardware) made by non-telecom companies. And am I the only one who thinks that voicemail -> email, ring time rules, and call-forwarding to your other phones should have existed 5+ years ago if your phone providers weren't sitting on their asses?

Thank you, Apple and Google, for showing phone companies what they should have been doing all along: improving.

Word to the wise: When a software company with actual ability and some edge decides to move into your industry, if they are doing things right, your industry will be disrupted.

Music, books, movie rentals, mobile phones: these are just the most familiar consumer-facing examples. Anyone else have other examples?

Note: while this mentions that FaceTime is an 'open standard', it's not, at least yet.

Steve Jobs promised it in June, but he has yet to release any documentation or the necessary information to make a compatible implementation.

That was easily the most misinformed article I have ever read on tc. I'm not even sure where to begin. About the only thing that is right is that services will be moving to the application layer in the long run because there are benefits the abstracting the network. But the idea that the people providing the data link upon which every service you care about depends on are becoming irrelevant is so absurd it makes me laugh. Where would apple and google be and where are they going without them?

Considering I know noone who uses Google Voice, nobody who uses FaceTime and a million people and two who uses Skype, this article seems kinda silly.

I guess the lesson which people should learn (especially the people in the US), is that there is severe differences between different markets and regions, and whatever happens in the US might be something interesting or it may be the US entering the space the rest of Europe and Asia entered 5 years ago or more.

I still don't get why FaceTime is any better than the other options out there, especially when it only works on Macs and Apple-devices.