Interestinthings Law, Startups, Music; maybe in that order

Google Voice: too good not to fail

"If you wanna to be a phone company, you can't go dead."*

Ok, but then you have to be a phone company. You have to roll out your own physical circuit-switched infrastructure that's managed at every junction. The phone network was evolved slowly over a century with reliability as one of the only concerns (since, as a regulated monopoly, they were only competing with not having a phone). For all its other faults, it delivered that dial tone, pretty much every minute of every day.

What's happening with Skype and Google Voice is that people are beginning to negotiate whether more features and less cost is worth trading in some of the POTS network's legendary reliability. In some ways, it's been an ongoing process since the Great Broadening of cellphone ownership in the 90s. All of a sudden, we could imagine life without a landline, and many of us decided that was the life to live. Now we have a nice handful of options for voice communication, and a metric ton of non-voice options.

One of the most fundamental attributes of the Internet is that things can fail, from the physical layer all the way up to the "business layer," and that has produced not only a staggering pace of innovation, but also an impressive kind of meta-reliability through redundancy. Things don't always work, but there are almost always other ways to do said things. Of course reliability is a feature; often it's one of the most important ones. If we hold out for perfect reliability, though, we will most likely have to wait for Ma Bell 2.0, and there are plenty of reasons we shouldn't want that. Instead, we should recognize all the options we already have; our own personal array of redundant communication channels, suited to our tastes.

*-I recognize the linked post is a couple of years old, but Arrington reiterated the sentiment in a post last week, which is what got me going here.