The dustup over Apple's disabling of the Google Voice app on the iPhone is getting interesting. According to David Pogue, Google is rewriting the Google Voice application so that it will run as an ordinary web page-but be accessed just like the iPhone's approved apps.
Why does AT&T care? Because Google Voice (like many other, much smaller applications) attacks the carriers' most vulnerable pockets of profit. Text messaging costs virtually nothing to provide but yields the carriers 25 cents per message or $5 and up for a bundle of texts. International calling is infrequently used but, at 25 cents/minute and up, commands direct margins of somewhere around 92% (by comparison, Skype international calls to landlines average around 2 to 4 cents per minute).
So, at one level this is a technical or commercial dispute between corporate giants. At another, though, it's a front-line battle for customer transparency. If AT&T, Verizon, etc., by dint of competitive threats, are required to reprice these fat-margined services, they'll have to forgo profits, or redistribute the costs to other services-ones which are more central to their offering and which can be more easily shopped by customers.
Perhaps then we'll get a bit closer to wireless service packaging that's friendly, or at least less forbidding, to the customers paying the bill.
Related post:
David Pogue's "Take Back the Beep"
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