Lots of buzz recently about Goog entering the VoIP business. Possible. But Om doesn't think so. I think it's probably 40/60 going the not likely route.
Some off-the-top thoughts on this. It would be easy for Goog to do this - either by themselves or using Skype (or other technologies like Peerio, etc.). However, it's just as likely that they're just continuing to build-out their current infrastructure globally and that backbone is becoming more and more important...
What's more interesting to me is the massive, truly global distributed network (really an Internet within an Internet) that they're building. The indications are even more interesting in terms of Goog scaling its business globally - i.e. Goog is building a GLOBAL online advertising / marketing capability for clients, regardless of where their clients are. Imagine placing an ad on Goog that can be on all their global websites (translations are done as well) and Goog being able to charge premium rates for these "global" or "international" ads...
Clearly, Goog is expecting to use much more backbone capacity, which to me would seem to indicate that they're expecting fairly significant scaling of bandwidth-intensive applications / services - i.e. video, images, gaming, etc. This is the far more interesting angle and one that is much more monetize-able than VoIP. These are also applications that lend themselves to increasing advertising / marketing revenues for Goog. Synergies with the current business model.
It will be interesting to see how this develops but I would expect Goog to do something unexpected.
Additional piece of info about Goog is that they just hired 2 main engineers working on Firefox, the open-source browser. Does this mean that they're looking to build a browser? Possibly.
How about a GUI app for video and entertainment over their distributed network? Again, much more money involved - and has significant synergies with their current business model revolving around ads and marketing.
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