Google just loves upsetting the apple cart. It shook up Web searching and advertising. It shook up free, Web-based e-mail services when Gmail offered gigabytes of free storage rather than a few megabytes. It shook up the way companies go public.
The latest development is particularly shakeworthy: Google now lets you make free phone calls from your computer. It isn’t new to fellow geeks who have installed Skype or iChat and use special “handles” like SkiBunny1968 — but it will be to normal people, on regular American and Canadian phone numbers. Free.
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The new feature, clunkily called Voice Calls from Gmail, was released yesterday. It’s tied into Google’s Gmail service. You need a Gmail account to make it work, and the dialer seamlessly incorporates your Gmail address book. That makes it very easy to call someone, because you type only a couple letters of the name and then press Enter.
I guess you could put on a headset to make this kind of call, but the truth is, your laptop’s built-in speaker and microphone work beautifully. Sound quality is very good. The delay is just under a second, like a cellphone call.
Calls to American and Canadian phone numbers are free. (That is fun to type!) Calls to other countries are very cheap — usually 2 cents a minute to landlines, 15 cents to cellphones. (The complete list of countries and rates is here: https://www.google.com/voice/rates.) The idea, clearly, is that Google will make enough money from the overseas calls to make the domestic ones free.
If you have a free Google Voice account too, then you can get incoming calls, too. A little box pops up to let you know that somebody’s calling you. If you answer at your computer, you can even press the * key on the on-screen keyboard to transfer the call to another phone, like your cellphone, so you can hit the road without skipping a word.
(If you don’t have a Google Voice account, you can’t get incoming calls. And whenever you place an outgoing call, the recipient sees the mystifying phone number 760-705-8888 on the Caller ID screen. Calling that number produces only a recording.)
All right. So why is this such a big deal?
Because it’s increasingly clear that one day, the Internet, not the outrageous cellphone companies, will connect our calls. The ultimate, of course, would be free calls from a phone, to a phone. But until now, all we’ve been able to do is dance around that concept.
For example, chat programs let you make free calls, computer-to-computer. Skype lets you make free calls from your cellphone, but not to regular phone numbers. Skype and Line2 let you make calls from your cellphone (when you’re in a 3G area or on Wi-Fi), to actual phone numbers — but not free.
What Voice Calls from Gmail does is open up another variation, one that strikes even closer to the “free calls from a phone, to a phone” ideal. Now it’s free calls “from a computer, to a phone.”
At the moment, you can’t use this new feature until you download and install a special plug-in for Mac or Windows. But you can’t help wondering: What if Google released an app like that for Android phones, or the iPhone?
Well, I’ll tell you what. At that point, you could, for the first time in history, make unlimited free phone-to-phone calls.
We’re tantalizingly close.
That development would cause conniptions at the cellphone companies, that’s for sure. It would completely change the game. It would remove the final fine print, the last obstacles, that separate us from the Internet-as-phone-company paradise that almost certainly awaits us.
I, for one, can’t wait.