The Corleone family has agreed to send young Michael to represent the interests of the family to the meeting with Vigril ˜The Turk’ Sollozzo and the corrupt Capt. Mark McCluskey of the New York City Police Dept. As Sonny puts so eloquently they’d like to send him with more than you know what in his hands. We all know the rest¦ before the ages of cell phones, call forwarding, and now GrandCentral important people like the Captain had to sign out with a forwarding number of where they can be reached. GrandCentral would have probably saved his life because he could have updated his forwarding number himself without any prying eyes knowing where he is. Of course all things being equal, the Captain today would have simply hit one pre-programmed button on his precinct phone to have all his calls forward to his mobile phone; A pure and simple solution. Or on the other hand, he could have hired a personal IT staff to help him configure GrandCentral to do pretty much the same thing for a huge time cost to set it all up and make the simple process very complicated.
As a technology consultant I have a very basic guiding principal to technology: keep it as simple as possible. Ochkahms’ razor applies for technology as well as science: All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best. Solutions that are easy to install, easy to use and easy to support tend to be the best fit for everyone. Remember, the technology must have a net advantage in adopting it to be worth the investment of time and money.
I found Grand Central to be a service that has a great deal of very esoteric and involved features. It felt a lot like bloat ware to me. By no means is this a nice, relatively thin layer connecting your phone numbers together in a unified system. This is a service offing a lot of features that to fully utilize require a lot of user buy in and configuration. Which of course, creates an equal amount of buy out when one realizes this is a big to-do and more trouble than it’s worth. A system designed to unify data in many respects can desynchronize it a lot. This is definitely a service designed by engineers for engineers.
Things I liked (kinda):
One number for you: I like the concept a lot. For people who MUST have more than 3 phone number I see this as a service that can be of some value. Having to constantly forward multiple numbers to others can be a huge pain and become unmanageable exponentially. However, for the vast majority of Americans who don’t have (or shouldn’t have) more than 3 phone numbers I just don’t see the ends of this service justifying the means.
Europeans already have this down, they already have one number for them: their cell phone. I always have it on me wherever I go. When I’m at home, I forward my calls home. When I’m at work, I forward my calls to that line. When I have my house on the shore I’ll forward my calls there in the unlikely event I get a landline. You should only have a line if you’re there more than 30%. Pony up your minutes to the Paris Hilton cell plan and go mobile.
Web Voice mail: I liked the idea of having all my messages available in one place. I could see the desire to access personal messages while at work and work messages while at home; all from one convenient place. On top of that the ability to easily view and replay on demand along with storing, forwarding and archiving I think that this has it’s advantages.
However, for those of you who don’t already know this feature is also available (albeit on separate pages) for most phone plans today. I like keeping my personal messages separate from work ones. I’d rather not have happy birthday messages next project planning emails. For an America in crisis of attention deficit, I see this lumping as a huge distraction and lack of organization.
Thing’s I’m so-so on:
1 line/Many users: Although falling out of style fast, many people still have home phones. I live in a house with a home phone and used this as part of the service to evaluate. I ran into some issues when the GrandCentral rang my home phone while I was away at the shore this weekend. There’s likely a way to configure this differently but it would be an issue for those with many users for 1 line. My family found this annoying knowing how popular I actually am.
User buy in: It’s not just you buying into this system, as involved as it is, it’s also all the people in your address book. Once this number is setup you have to get it out there and make people understand and actually use it. That is a lot of work and a huge buy in for me and all my contacts. Once you realize what a pain it is, it’s also a big buy out too.
Things I definitely didn’t like:
NO Sync: This was the deal closer for me. In getting started the user places a copy, that’s right, a copy of their existing address book into GrandCentral. They make it easy to do, but it’s still a unchanging copy that is no different from your personal and work address book. More to keep track off!
This causes you to go out of sync very fast and spend a lot of time keeping them insync. Creating yet another address book that stays out of sync with all the others I’m already trying to consolidate. Until they create a plugin for Exchange (and other popular address book systems) on an open standard it’s more trouble than it’s worth. They should be slapped for this.
A LOT of Configuration: There are freakin’ lot of features that all require extensive customization to get working. This service requires a heck of a lot of time to setup just right. Even for me, a very smart and technical guy, this had a high learning curve and seemed a bit much. Rules, ring tones, personalized greetings, even more voicemail forwarding¦ it’ll cost you more time than it saves.
To much contact: For these features to work best, GrandCentral must know your callers. If not, they tend to slip though the other crack and either go right to voicemail (which can be good or very bad) or call every line you have (which is very annoying). For Windows users who like their technology to be up in their business and not in the background doing it’s job, you may like this. For the rest of us who enjoy elegant software this is a lot of overhead and customization, that for all but the power-users can just be a royal pain and time sink.
Conclusion:
With the brains and strength that is Google, I hope they can do something with this system for the sake of their investment. I think this type of service is past its time. Software and services that are bloated with features, not easily scalable, and don’t follow the flow of future technology are on their way out. The majority of these services already exist with your current service offerings. The only thing users need to do is learn how to make them work better for themselves. The little extras like posting to a webpage are nice, but forgettable. The high buy in from the user and their contacts is a lot of work. Supporting all these features for most users can be very labor intensive and not always provide consistent results. The added expense of bumping up your cell minutes will more than make up for the explicit and implicit time costs in getting this setup. In my professional opinion GrandCentral is a grand waste of time.
Categories: Advise, Consult, Web 2.0
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