Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
You're assuming it's still sent over the SMS portion of the network. I imagine GV app could set up push notifications to just use the data network, ...
Note that SMS messages share the (very low bandwidth) control channel with all the other control messages. While SMS pricing is, of course, "all the traffic will bear", it CAN'T be free, because it must be rationed somehow. (It would be trivial to build an IP-over-SMS tunnel and swamp it.) Charging ten cents per 120-payload-byte packet keeps the traffic down to something the channel can handle - even with the texting explosion.
Switch it to the broadband data channel and a text message effectively becomes a minuscule email (fitting into a single tiny packet) with a vanishingly small cost. It's fine for that to be "free", meaning "having a marginal cost" like an elevator ride, i.e. "too cheap to meter, include it in the flat-rate overhead".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
>>>it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience. Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality
>>>
Oh man.
You make me so hot with your sexy words! (drops panties) Do me now, Mr. Apple Marketer! Ride my love muffin to heaven!
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As a iPhone owner and Google Voice users I can safely say while Visual voice mail is awesome, its not WHY I bought my iPhone. The iPod and first web browser that didn't suck ass on a phone would be far in front of visual voice mail.
GV is nifty but its not that impressive, its just basically a public version of an astrisk box that you don't have to maintain. The only difference between what it has right now and an asterisk box is that I don't have to worry about futzing with the asterisk machine when it gets loopy, for other less technical people, GV is obviously easier to do it with.
GV is still missing the most absolutely vital component to the whole picture. GV is useless without a computer or phone to listen to or read your messages on, so GV without a phone is useless. an iPhone without GV is still pretty useful, although you can't sign up for GV from mobile safari for some reason.
Visual voice mail was no more difficult for them than setting up the blackberry email push systems. I hate when people just spew some random bullshit and get marketed insightful.
When you can get Google voice to act as the handset for me, then maybe we'll talk, until then you're just a google fanboy trying to be a iphone hater.
Heres a hint, you suck at both.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You know, I'm all for getting rid of AT&T and the likes, but why the hell don't they have the right to use their products influence to subdue competition.
You live in some fucked up utopian dream world that doesn't exist, businesses CAN use their products to tie you in, stop being a whiney bitch. 'No one is as good as XXX and I don't want to pay XXX' So go use YYY and not get service as good as XXX, don't try to enact a law or file suite to change things just because you don't like the way things turned out.
Why AT&T SHOULDN'T get by with this is because we've funded their asses to roll out broadband and cell access to rural areas and they've utterly failed to provide what they promised to do with the money we gave them, our tax money.
But thats not what you're bitching about, you're simply bitching that you don't like AT&T so you think its immoral that you have to play by their rules in order to use their service. Don't use their service, don't use an iPhone, problem solved.
Its a shame society exists, your dumb ass would have been eaten by the lion while whining about how its unfair that you can't run as fast as everyone else so you are going to get eaten.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As an "engineer" I think a little honesty is in order about just what the 10.3 > 10.4 > 10.5 upgrade was, compared to the three service packs in XP.
Apple should simply have chosen new names for each release, say something like "Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7" and just kept decimal points to patches, like SP1, SP2 and SP3.
10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 were three separate operating system releases, unlike the three service packs for XP. They are no more similar or dissimilar to the amount of changes between MS releases like 95, 98, 2k, XP, Vista, which most certainly were not free upgrades from one to the next.
Also, the full, uncrippled version of the Mac OS is in the retail box. None of this "Home Edition" "Premium Edition" junk with artificially crippled portions of the OS.
Who cares if 10.5 is "better"? Using XP has cost me *nothing* over the last seven years, and it's hard to beat that. I like free.
Aside-
For the record I don't really think Mac OS is better. Back in the 80s and 90s the best OS for home users was AmigaOS with its multimedia and multitasking capabilities. After that died-off, Mac OS 8/9 were acceptable replacements that ran circles around Windows 3 and 95, but since XP hit the market I consider that to be the best OS of this decade.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Who cares? The point is that, over the last seven years, Mac OS has cost me a shitload of money in annual upgrades where XP OS has not. I prefer products that save me money over those that don't.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Okay, subtract out the time spent with viruses and system slowdowns. Most people reinstall XP every couple years to clear out cruft, and that can eat a day. Also, consider that OSX is more resistant to botnet membership and 'just works' in a lot of places where XP doesn't. Honestly, $50/yr doesn't seem like a big deal.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I don't see anything that did wrong here.
For about 200 ms I started to take you seriously, and then I started laughing. Good job.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.