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The other day I was thinking about Google Voice. In and of itself it has enormous potential to completely shake up the phone industry, which I’m sure is why AT&T has such a problem with it. But then I started thinking about another of Google’s great products, Google Apps. They have a fairly strong offering already, covering some basic communication and collaboration tools such as email, calendar, contacts (in beta), chat, and documents, as well as more public facing tools like web pages and sites and app engine.
But what if they started to bundle Voice into Apps? That is one huge section of running a business that Google could easily take over and simplify just as they have done with everything else in Google Apps. It seems that it would be almost trivial to setup one master phone number for a business and provide an extension for each employee or department, which in turn would forward to whatever number was set, just as Google Voice already does with regular phone numbers. Setting up and managing a large switchboard of sorts would be easy for business to do, and be a huge bonus to switching to Google Apps. Plus with the upcoming number portability, existing business could switch over to Google Apps.
And this could apply not only to businesses, but also to educational institutions and even families or other groups with Google Apps accounts, making it easier to communicate with people in any situation.
There is such huge potential in bundling Google Voice into Apps, I’m almost surprised that it hasn’t been done yet and that it hasn’t been talked about much (if at all). So here’s to hoping that it happens eventually.