Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Earlier today I accidentally wiped out my enterprise activation on my Blackberry. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that I’m at my Mother-in-Law’s house for Canadian Thanksgiving, and she hasn’t got any internet access.  I was depending on my Blackberry to moderate comments on the blog.  Now I don’t even have that!

So, if the moderation is a little slow, well, think of me enjoying my Thanksgiving Dinner without being enslaved to my Crackberry.  First time in probably three years. 

Will Google really abandon Click-to-Call?  It’s doubtful. More likely is that the Google blog was hacked. 

1. The hard part about click to call is not the telephony piece.  The technically hard piece is the advertising and targeting engine.  The hard business piece is building the relationships with the advertisers and the publishers. Google has already done the heavy lifting.  They can go to anyone for the telephony piece. 
2. GTalk needs a telephony partnership to be competitive against MSN, AOL, Yahoo and Skype.  They need to provide terminations on the PSTN as part of the package.  Google’s going to be buying PSTN terminations no matter what.
3. The post cited by Om references anti-competitive concerns.  Horse hockey!  There’s a healthy market for both context-driven advertising, and for telephony terminations.  Combining them makes sense for the advertiser, the customer, the network operator, and Google. 
4. Some have speculated that Google’s recent deal with EBay might be a reason for abandoning click-to-call.  The deal changes nothing.  There’s a lot of potential there, to do be sure, but there just isn’t a large market of Skype enabled EBay sellers yet.  Why would Google abandon their click-to-call ambitions to partner with Skype and sell to EBay sellers?  If Skype / EBay were going to be the partner  for Google on Click-to-Call then why do the deal only in Europe?

Nope.  This dog don’t hunt.