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Why AT&T Killed iPhone Google Voice
ZuchinniOne writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article about the likely reasons that AT&T and Apple killed the Google Voice application. 'With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone — office, home or cellular — rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.'"
AT&T told the FCC that they did not have it killed.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/21/att-to-fcc-we-did-not-block-the-google-voice-app-on-the-iphone/
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Here is a full list for the lazy:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/ An unusual move for Apple, but apparently pretty straighforward.
AT&T denies any role in rejecting the google voice application. Apple, also denies rejecting the application, but claims it is still studying it.
This is sort of interesting to watch, whose business relationship is decaying faster, Apple and Google's or Apple and AT&T's? (Or Microsoft's and Dell or MS and HP, but that's a different thread.)
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
And Apple said today it isn't killed, but still under review because it interferes with the iPhone interface. Here is their rationalization for their actions in what they claim is their response to the FCC.
My thanks to daringfireball and John Gruber for bringing this letter to my attention.
Engadget has the filings from all three of the involved companies.
I love how the speculation gets posted here when the official statements from all three companies are readily available. The only major redaction is Google's side of the story on why GV and other apps were rejected.
This particular article was pretty good though. Thorough and generally well thought out, it also had that kind of shocked anger of someone who only just realized that they are being taken advantage of. I wouldn't be surprised if the author had started out writing a 'tell both sides of the story' kind of article, only to become more informed on the actual situation over the course of his research.
All that being said, I do take issue with one thing...
Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and others all joined AT&T in bidding huge amounts for wireless spectrum in FCC auctions, some $70-plus billion since the mid-1990s. That all gets passed along to you and me in the form of higher fees and friendly oligopolies that don't much compete on price.
That is not how business works. If a certain behavior on their part can maximize revenues, they will implement it regardless of what the upfront costs were. If they had paid $10 for the spectrum, they would still charge high fees because that is what the market is willing to bear and that is what they feel with maximize their revenues and with that their profits. You can argue that the cost of spectrum raises the cost of entry into the market, but I don't see that as what the author is going for here.
Apple just admitted that it was them and not AT&T.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/?sr=hotnews.rss
So much for all that crap you just wrote.
It will be funny to see all the Apple fanboys who were screaming "It was big bad AT&T and not my PRECIOUS Apple who was the bad guy!!!" and how their fanboy minds deal with this news.
Man, Apple couldn't possibly be blowing it more than they are. Google Voice is amazing.
the one thing that doesn't make sense is the 'free texting' portion - the SMS still has to be sent to your phone by your carrier, so how would it be any less expensive than normal?
It isn't less expensive than normal - the cost to physically provide the SMS service is the same: VIRTUALLY NOTHING.
What the cell phone carrier loses is the ability to charge pigopolist SMS rates with ridiculous margins, since the SMS is now carried by Google.
Skype is locked to wifi only.
The hottest cellphone app being blocked by your beloved Apple!
Don't cry emo assclowns, you still your iFart and I'm Rich iPhone apps...
SBC, which was originally "Southwest Bell", one of the "baby bells" created by the breakup of AT&T, and which had purchased several other baby bells in the intervening period, in 2005 also purchased AT&T (not just the AT&T name), and applied the AT&T name to the whole post-merger organization.
So, the new AT&T is, very much, the old (pre-1984) AT&T, even more than the 1984-2005 AT&T was.
AT&T killed google voice because the "Killer App" that the iPhone has (visual voicemail) is completely, totally, and utterly DESTROYED by it.
If you haven't used google voice, let me explain. Somebody leaves you a voicemail on your GV number. Google does voice recognition on it, and sends you an email of the text. In the email is a little widget that allows you to play the audio.
[...]
The voice recognition of GV is about as good as the handwriting recognition of the original Newton.
Here's what my brother actually said:
Hello, Happy Birthday my brother.
What GV said he said:
Hello, The bird say my brought their.
Fortunately, the audio was available, so I was able to easily hear what he said, but the other GV transcript I got from my wife wasn't much better (the drugstore CVS got turned into "we're going to see me yes").
Google Voice is nice, and I like using it, but don't think it's a miracle app.
Have you ever clicked on the link labeled "Settings" on the Google Voice page? Down there a ways is a checkbox with the words "Transcribe Voicemails" next to it. Remove the checkmark there, and then click the "Save Settings" button right below it.
Thanks for the great link!
There's a lot of BS in that article, but a couple of things which particularly struck me as ridiculous:
disabling it??? GV wouldn't disable anything - Apple's Visual Voicemail would still be there, and if someone called the iPhone directly, it would still work just fine. Nothing's disabled at all!
Hmmm... Google Voice does have a privacy policy, as I recall....
I think that's pretty clear about how the data will be used.
Allow me to pull out a legitimate Google Voice transcript. You can get the jist of the message (telemarketing for some after-school/summer program), but it's by no means 100% accurate (I do not have a daughter, the call was obviously a wrong number):
I agree. Note that the only reason that OS X is any good at all is because it's a completely different OS (derived from Next), and not descended from the joke that was "classic" MacOS (that only looked good compared to the even worse offerings from MS like DOS). I do find it amusing that after years of Mac fans claiming MacOS was superior back then (whilst I, like you, favoured AmigaOS), Apple themselves turned round and ditched MacOS for something else.
Of course in response they bury their heads in the sand, and insist the new OS is now "MacOS".
I agree about XP (and 2000 is good too). In a similar manner, it's a separate OS line to DOS/Windows 9x, and it's a perfectly fine OS. The irony is that Mac fans still bash Windows XP based on their experiences of Windows 9x ("it crashes all the time!"), despite the fact that if we judged OS X by our experiences of classic MacOS, it'd be a laughing stock ("what's that? You can't even multitask?").