It's Official - Google Acquires Gizmo5!
After many months of heavy speculation, Google finally acquires Gizmo5 for a reported $30 million. The two word description of Gizmo5 is “Another Skype”. Of course, both services have their own plusses and minuses, but a lot like IM systems, the biggest one is probably who can you call for free on each network and who is on the other one. (A few years ago, eBay paid $1.4 billion for Skype, without the IP for a key underlying technology. That’s almost 50 times as much as Google paid for Gizmo5.) This means that, as explained in our article from just a few days ago http://www.googlevoicesecrets.com/make-and-receive-google-voice-calls-directly, you can now use Google Voice as your telephony control system and Google’s Gizmo5 as one of your real telephones in real phone conversations!
The timing of that article was purely coincidental. This was one of the hundred or so articles that we have had sitting on our to-be-written list since June. If you are a decent writer with some free time, but don’t know what to write about, please contact us for some article ideas that we’d love to see on www.GoogleVoiceSecrets.com. The techie stuff has already been done. The hard part – putting it into plain English – is what’s holding us back.
This acquisition seemed like a logical thing ever since Google acquired GrandCentral back in 2007, partially because it would help fill in a gap in their services and partially because GrandCentral had already been working quite well with Gizmo5 since the beginning. But would it really happen? Up until very recently, Skype was reportedly in talks to acquire Gizmo5 themselves. They could have used the Gizmo5 backbone as a replacement for the IP still owned by Skype’s founders. Now that eBay has sold off most of Skype to a group that includes Skype’s founders, they really had no direct use Gizmo5, except possibly taking them off the market in order to make it that much harder for another company to come along and become a competitor. In terms of perceived market-share, if Skype was Microsoft, Gizmo5 was Apple and Yahoo Voice (and others) were Linux. (This isn’t a statement on the actual market share of any of these systems or a comment on the perceived usability of any of these systems.) Well, Skype didn’t need them and I think that it’s a good thing that they didn’t waste money trying to crush a competitor. More importantly, it’s great that Google got off the fence and acquired this missing link. (One wonders if they would have held out for a few more months if they could have purchased all of Yahoo, including Yahoo Voice, for less than $30 million, but better a good deal now than gambling on a better deal later. J ) Finally, here’s a bit of Good News and Bad News: The Good News – While we haven’t had enough time to play around with Gizmo5 enough to confirm this, it appears that Gizmo5 makes it easy to switch between accounts. It might even allow you to be logged into more than one account at the same time, on the same computer. If that’s true, that would be a huge advantage over Skype. (I still have two paid accounts on Skype (with nice sounding phone numbers for separate businesses). Since I am actually paying for them, it is exceptionally annoying to have to log out of one account, just to check on the other one.) Of course, even if this is true today, it seems to be Google’s policy to try to lock down each person to a single account for everything. The Bad News – Since the official announcement, Gizmo5 is “suspending new signups” until it is re-launched under the Google brand name. This sounds a lot like what happened to GrandCentral in July of 2007 and it was almost two years before new people could sign up for Google Voice after that. (I doubt that it will take that long this time – the feature set seems complete, but Google will no doubt want to tweak it a bit and link it to your Google Account(s?). Likewise, Gizmo5 was able to handle it’s old growth rate, but it will probably have to do some preparation in order to scale up as fast as it will need to as Google latest offering.) Steven (at) GoogleVoiceSecrets.com References:
The essential facts about Gizmo5 for readers of www.GoogleVoiceSecrets.com from November 10th, 2009:
http://www.googlevoicesecrets.com/make-and-receive-google-voice-calls-directly Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch’s scoop of the story on November 9th, 2009:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/exclusive-google-has-acquired-gizmo5/ CNET’s coverage of the official announcement on November 12th, 2009:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10397006-265.html The official announcement by Wesley Chan and Craig Walker, cofounders of GrandCentral and now Group Product Managers for Google Voice:
http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-welcomes-gizmo5.html The official Gizmo5 site:
www.Gizmo5.com now takes you to www.google.com/gizmo5/ More about Yahoo Voice:
http://voice.yahoo.jajah.com/home/index.castle As long as I mentioned having still having two Skype numbers for two of my businesses above, I probably should include a shameless plug for them here. For expert software development, specializing in Microsoft technologies, database design and user interface issues, check out:
www.Compuvision.Info For expert help in the process of implementing a Lean Manufacturing system, including a really good PFEP database which is at the heart of any Lean Manufacturing system, check out:
www.PFEP.Info
