Gizmo5

» see gizmo5.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed gizmo5. by 2008 i was running skype on a borrowed campus connection over ttnet and it more or less worked for what i needed, the call quality was bad but the fellow students were all on skype, the path of least resistance was to stay there. an open sip softphone with sip federation was the kind of thing i had read about on slashdot and not actually installed. the user base it grew into was global but sip-nerd-coded, much closer to small linux meetup attendance than skype-on-msn user count.

look, the founder was michael robertson, the same person who built mp3.com in the late 90s and lindows (then linspire) in the 2000s. for whatever reason, robertson liked to ship the open-standards version of whatever proprietary product was winning a category. mp3.com was the open mp3 catalog against the labels. lindows was the open desktop against windows. gizmo was the open sip softphone against skype. that pattern made the products easy to understand and also made them easy to outflank because the proprietary version usually had more money and more lock-in.

honestly, the product itself was solid for what it was. you installed a small desktop client on windows or mac or linux, picked a sip address that looked like an email, you could call other gizmo users for free or any sip address on the federated open siphone network. paid breakout to the regular phone network worked through purchased credit. the symbian and maemo clients let you make sip calls over wifi on nokia hardware, which mattered for a small number of people on the nokia n800 and n810 internet tablets. by mid-2009 gizmo claimed around 3 million registered users.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the open sip federation was the differentiator (or whatever it was called). a sip address registered on the open siphone network could receive calls from any other sip endpoint that knew how to route to it. that was the bet against skype, which used a proprietary protocol and a closed user directory. either way, the federation idea was always more popular on slashdot than in actual daily usage. most users just called other gizmo users, which is the same lock-in pattern as skype.

the cross-platform release schedule also mattered for nokia internet tablet users. fring was the other sip-on-nokia option in that window (already in our graves under its own slug). between gizmo and fring, the n800 had a real voip story for about three years before the iphone pulled the small-device internet category in a different direction.

~ the decline ~

the business model was the problem. for some reason, the free sip-to-sip calls were free and the paid breakout to the regular phone network had margins competing against the rest of the voip-to-phone industry, which had been racing those margins to zero since 2002. honestly, the company never found a service tier that paid for the engineering work on the desktop and mobile clients.

google was assembling a voice product through the gv mobile acquisition in 2007 and the grandcentral acquisition the same year, which became google voice in 2009. for some reason, the missing piece for google voice was a real sip back-end and a softphone client that could handle inbound and outbound calls without going through a separate carrier. gizmo5 was the obvious shape for that piece. anyway, the gv mobile acquisition handled the iphone side, gizmo handled the sip side, grandcentral handled the phone-number side.

~ the day it died ~

this part you had to be in the us for and i was not. google announced the gizmo5 acquisition on november 12 2009 for what reports put around 30 million dollars (or whatever it was called). new account signups were turned off the same week. existing users were told the service would continue for a while during the integration. nothing happened on the integration side that was visible to anyone outside google.

on march 3 2011 the shutdown notice went out by email. the service ended on april 3 2011, exactly thirty days later. existing call credit had to be refunded by paypal or written off. honestly, by then the google voice product had moved in a direction where a separate sip softphone was no longer the integration shape google wanted. the engineering team mostly stayed on at google for the gtalk and hangouts side. michael robertson moved on to a music product called mp3tunes which had its own legal collapse with emi a year later.

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