GrandCentral

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

~ the goodbye ~

grandcentral was US-only at the carrier layer. it gave you a single phone number from any area code in the country, then rang every device on your file when somebody called the number. you could record a different greeting for each contact. blacklisted callers got sent to a fake "disconnected" recording, and you could screen the call before picking up. the catch was that all of this required a US phone number on a US carrier billing relationship, which meant the customer base sat entirely inside the country.

craig walker and vincent paquet founded the company in 2005 in fremont, california. by mid '07 the closed beta was big enough on tech blogs that google paid roughly ninety five million dollars to acquire it on july 2 of that year. wesley chan led the deal. the team kept operating the product under the grandcentral name while google retooled the backend on its own infrastructure. for whatever reason the closed beta then lasted eighteen months.

i could not have signed up. turkey was on ttnet adsl with no real consumer voip ecosystem outside skype, and skype was the product for international calls home from foreign cities. the idea of having a US virtual number to forward to your real phone was the kind of thing american tech bloggers wrote about while the rest of the world watched, ran skype, kept paying whatever the local mobile carrier billed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how google took it ~

the relaunch happened on march 11 2009 under the new name google voice. existing grandcentral users were migrated automatically. the new product added voicemail transcription and free SMS. conference calling and gmail integration came in the same release. invites trickled out to non-beta US users over the spring. honestly, the grandcentral domain kept redirecting for a while but the brand was gone. the calling services formally ended on september 15 2009.

~ what it became ~

google voice ran for sixteen years and never expanded outside the united states. for long stretches in the late 2010s the product sat in the same google-graveyard waiting room as reader and wave, periodically rumored to be dead but never quite killed. eventually it stabilized as a business workspace feature. the consumer one-number-for-life promise came back through carrier-level offerings like google fi, but the original grandcentral product never made it out of the US territory boundary.

~ what survived ~

the inheritance is the assumption, now universal, that your phone number should travel between devices instead of staying locked to a sim card. by 2026 every messenger that does voice over the top of carriers carries some piece of the grandcentral idea. wesley chan's bet on a small fremont startup worked, the startup brand died early. craig walker went on to found another voice startup. vincent paquet stayed at google. grandcentral's name sat on a redirect for about a year and then quietly came off the maps.

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