Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Skype Can’t Be Happy About This…
Suddenly Skype seems so much less necessary.
Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
I’ve set it up, I’ve tried it, and I love it. Works beautifully.
I already use Google voice for all of my international calls--the rates are pretty reasonable--but the fact that it ties into my Google Voice account is a nice bonus. The only significant negative with Google Voice--and it is a significant negative--is that I have missed a few incoming calls. Apparently there are a few carriers who refuse to acknowledge the existence of Google Voice. Since I use this for business, again I say: this is a significant negative.
Sadly, it doesn’t even block the salesman who has called me about fifteen times since last Thursday. I gave him an hour of my life on Friday, listened to his pitch, and told him that I didn’t have the budget or the inclination to buy right now; I even told him he should call back toward the end of September when I was looking over the marketing plan and the budget for next year.
Funny enough, I really was going to consider a trial run with his product, but the constant calling after I told him to leave me alone until I had a chance to look at next year’s budget has solved that particular problem. There is no way that I am buying from him.
Let this be a lesson to any of you in sales: don’t harass the prospect and don’t talk yourself out of a sale.
I do wonder what they’ll be charging for it next year, though. If it is a reasonable annual fee, I’ll be happy to add that onto my Google tab (along with my added storage and those international calls).
Update: Just going through my bills right now and looked at my cell phone bill and there was one international call. A few days ago I called one of our partners in Australia and chatted for a grand total 8 minutes. The charge for that 8 minutes? $29.12. That same call in Google Voice would have cost $1.12.
Still trying to wrap my head around a $29.12 call that lasted only 8 minutes.
Comments & Trackbacks
I know I’m like the lone voice crying in the wilderness, but I refuse to use Google for every damn thing. Don’t have a Gmail account. Don’t have a Google phone, or voicemail, or anything, in fact, that ties Google to me. Except for everybody in the world who has a Gmail account that I correspond with.
I’ve worked on big databases (or what was, back when I was doing that kind of stuff—and Google’s makes those seem lilliputian). I’ve seen what’s possible with only a relatively small dataset. But very few people care about privacy these days, AFAICT.
"The charge for that 8 minutes? $29.12.”
Stagflation, Democratic congress, and $30 phonecalls.
Whoa! 70s flashback.
Well, maybe the president and vice president will resign in disgrace.
Hope springs eternal.
2007 - $19.00 connection charge for collect call, from a no name phone company’s pay phone. Plus charge for operator and long distance charges.
The hold that Google has on my life (Google Voice, Gmail, Google Wave (I’ll still use it), Google Docs...) is a little disconcerting. I understand your point.
However, the convenience provided, the much lower cost, and the way it all works together makes it so much easier for me to do parts of my job.
Doug, I said during the end of the Bush years that it was feeling a bit like the 70s. A few years later, I’m starting to think that it might feel a bit like 1930--and that is terrifying.
Virginia, it doesn’t break out the connection charge for me, but I’m guessing that a good chunk of the call would be found there. If I had made a half our call, I probably wouldn’t feel quite so burned by the prices. The nice thing about Google Voice is that there is no connection fee and I can route the call through my cell phone or home phone (or, now, my computer).