Google announced Wednesday that a ‘Call Phone’ option will be made available for its Gmail users. A bold move that will allow users to make phone calls over the Internet to challenge Skype’s dominance over the service.
The ‘Call Phone’ option will appear in the Gmail user’s chat window. When clicked, a telephone dialer will pop up on the screen and users can place calls through an internal microphone or connected headset.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of 2010. But calls to other countries, like U.K., France, Germany, China, and Japan, will be offered for 2 cents per minute.
Google said that the service will be available to its U.S. users in the next several days, but international users have yet to hear a definite timeline regarding its availability abroad.
The move positions the company to clash with Skype. And like Skype, Google has also the option to sell this service to corporations. But Google hasn’t had much success with the business sector. Their Apps services are slow to be adopted by corporate costumers, as the company also recently terminated Google Wave – a collaborative tool for businesses.
Analysts say that Google is just providing fans and users with something just good enough to use, but not necessarily good enough to meet enterprise requirements. As a result, Google’s paid revenue stream for this new service is projected to be just $20.3 million per quarter or 0.3% of Google’s second quarter revenue.
Source: CNN Money
