A cautionary note about Google’s “number for life”

To be fair, I guess Grandcentral ,when they advertised “one number for life”, didn’t specify whose life.

After waiting impatiently nearly two weeks for my Grandcentral account to upgrade to Google Voice – I was a bit surprised to wake up to an email advising me that if I wanted to keep my old Grandcentral number that I’d have to forgo any SMS forwarding features (the MAJOR new feature of Google Voice). Say what? I thought I had my Grandcentral number “for life”?

Turns out there’s some type of glitch in upgrading the old Grandcentral accounts to Google Voice. Here’s the email that landed in my inbox this morning:

From:
Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:04 AM
Subject: Your GrandCentral number
To: wayne

Hello wayne

We’re happy to announce that your GrandCentral account can now be upgraded to Google Voice. In addition to the great GrandCentral features you already know, Google Voice gives you free transcription of all your voicemail, conference calling, and more. You can also use your Google Voice account to make low cost international calls and free calls to anywhere in the United States.

Unfortunately, there is a group of about 891 phone numbers for which we are not able to enable the new SMS feature. Your phone numbers is one of these that won’t support SMS, so we would like to offer you two upgrade options:

1. You can upgrade your current GrandCentral number to Google Voice. You will get all new Google Voice features, except SMS.

2. You can select a brand new Google Voice number that will support SMS. You can also keep your existing GrandCentral number working for the next 3 months while you tell people your new number, and you can still check voicemails to that number in your GrandCentral account.

Let us know which option you prefer here and we will upgrade your account accordingly.

Thanks,

The Google Voice Team

If I want, Google will be happy to let me keep the old Grandcentral number. I just won’t be able to use SMS message forwarding on any of the lines that it rings to.

So much for the concept of number “for life”.

Which brings me to my original question that I asked.

What happens when we all wake up, after adopting one number for life – aka Google Voice, to an email that perhaps notifies us that in 3 months Google will be charging for all of our voice calls?

A few things that are worth thinking about before widely distributing a Google Voice phone number to your “serious” contacts such as the kids schools and doctors.