Andrew Lisy's Blog

In his latest article called Phone Revolution, Tony Lawrence talks about Google Voice and his excitement about the new features. Its been blogged to death in the last week, but some of the highlights of this cool new service include:

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• ...etc

What struck me about this post wasn't anything about Google Voice specifically, since I've heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.

Let's think about this for a minute. Who are the major losers of the last decade? To name a few: the recording industry (RIAA), newspaper publishers (NYT, Tribute, etc), telcos, radio broadcasters. Why are they failing? Do people no longer listen to music, read news, call on the phone, or listen to broadcasts in their car? In every one of these cases, these companies have seen their delivery mechanism fundamentally change. Who has taken their place? Technology companies. Apple/Amazon on the music front, Google News, blogs and other online sources on the newspaper front, IM/email/Facebook on the communications front, and podcasting/satellite radio on the broadcasting front. The content itself is basically the same, but these providers are getting crushed because they have failed to innovate. Google is taking over the world because they are amazing with technology. They might not know a thing about news or phones, but they are miles ahead on the innovation front -- its not even a fair fight. Google sees where technology is going -- better, faster, cheaper, and has a proven record of jumping on it.

What the entrenched businesses need to do is to stop looking backwards -- forget about CDs, let go of paper news, and figure out how you can deliver your content faster, better, and cheaper to the consumer. Reduce the size of your legal department, and build up an "innovation" department to figure out ways to change your business with technology. Experiment -- try giving stuff away free, charging, micropayments, ad-supported -- there are business models that will work on the internet that haven't been invented yet. Find them. Because if you don't, Google will.