I found many of the same frustrations with GV and have basically given up on it for now. Like you I don’t want to have another number to give out so portability will be important. I’ve made the step to make my mobile number my primary number, there is a phone on my desk but it’s basically used only as an intercom to other offices. Thanks to caller ID and not being high profile I’ve found it pretty easy to get away with. Part of that was the fact my iPhone works pretty well most places I go, including home.

Besides the horrible transcription (which there is a great site somewhere with funny botched transcriptions) was there lack of support for Google for your domain accounts. I use google services, but I’m not going to also going to have a second instance of my contacts in gmail to manage just for Google voice. From launch it should have been compatible with Google Apps accounts.

The one advantage GV has, and a feature I was really looking forward to, was SMS. Even though I have essentially consolidated down to one phone for everything (thanks headset and Bluetooth speakerphones) most of the time I would like to handle SMS like email, on the phone and on the web. I am looking forward to the time when there is a supported google voice app for the iPhone.

I’ve used PhoneTag on and off for the last few years and have been quite happy with there service, best transcription I’ve found yet. I’m not currently using it, but am looking at switch back. The one feature I would really like is a PhoneTag iPhone app. Much like there blackberry app, something that would list the voicemail and allow easy playback directly from the phone. Brad, do you happen to have the phonetag message play on your outgoing message? I’m wondering you have noticed a difference in the transcription quality with the notice on or off.

Interesting. I've been looking at the Zeo but have a hard time justifying the cost, because I've believed (rightly or wrongly) a lot of my poor sleep is caused by a lack of sleep which I don't need a $250 device to tell me I'm not getting enough. it's interesting to see that you're finding that sleep time is not the biggest driver of your sleep quality. I now might at least try out the Zeo. Although, I am still waiting for my FitBit to ship, and that might be able to give me "good enough" coverage on sleep data where I wouldn't need a Zeo.

I feel Microsoft knows it must maintain its dominance in enterprise messaging and the entire back-end infrastructure for enterprises. So if they are able to essentially lock in customers for at least a few more years and more fully develop and integrate their offerings it should provide a disincentive for customer to switch to Google apps as you mention. Having no first hand knowledge of the situation, I would think the potential anti-trust issues were less of a motivating factor than a more fundamental change in Microsoft's products end-user base. Apple's OS market share has been increasing over recent years and some enterprises (small, medium, and large) are starting to deploy OS X throughout their environment. I see it being the natural shift Microsoft needs to do to keep customers. To me it appears as a sign that enterprises providers are acting on the changing end-user expectations to access enterprises services regardless of the end client. We all know Entourage sucks and I'm sure Microsoft's Outlook for Mac will sell. But until then, and for their customers who are not familiar with Outlook (acquiring new customers who were in Mac predominate environments) integrating with Apple's native apps makes sense.

At the end of the day most enterprise clients will buy their end-user products as well (the office suite) but there will be those that do not, and this allows them to capture or keep the server side.

Reading this post raised tangential question, what impacts does this license have on Google Apps ability to sync through their Active Sync license with Snow Leopard which I asked about on my blog.