Comments on: GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead

By: Commiting to Zero « a la 360 by Gadi Shamia

Commiting to Zero « a la 360 by Gadi Shamia — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:40:23 +0000

[...] paid nothing, I owe you nothing”. (Take Grand Central for instance: this free Google service was down a couple of times in the recent weeks and for hours users couldn’t even get to a web page that will provide [...]

By: Who’s About To Get Fired From Google?

Who’s About To Get Fired From Google? — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:03:07 +0000

[...] isn’t the first time that Grandcentral has run into problems. Last month the service was down for hours - something that a phone service can’t [...]

By: Week 08-16 del.icio.us links April 15, 2008 « SteveintheUK.Com

Week 08-16 del.icio.us links April 15, 2008 « SteveintheUK.Com — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:42:23 +0000

[...] GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead - TechCrunch.com [...]

By: Free Phone Dude

Free Phone Dude — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:18:00 +0000

Gimme a break.

Grand Central is the best free service I’ve used, and I’ve had them all.
I’ve paid for similar services too, and they sucked.
Do I publish the number for business? No way.
Nor would I ever publish a VOIP number.

I’m wary enough relying on a cellphone number for business.
Give me my own LEC landline anyday. Thanks, I’ll pay for it.

Surely Google will bring assurances of better reliability to GC, but restaging, recoding, relocating such a service does not happen overnight, or even in 6 months.

Its free, folks.

By: Roundup: Layoffs at Sitoa, GrandCentral gets knocked offline, and more » VentureBeat

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:29:12 +0000

[...] — The online phone company which Google bought last year was down for most of this morning, TechCrunch reports. While the company blames a power outage on the service going down, it speaks to a larger issue as [...]

By: Overheard in the Blogosphere 19

Overheard in the Blogosphere 19 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:31:26 +0000

[...] Homeless Man i would pay to have a middle finger icon on skype IM [...]

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:40:22 +0000

It’s amazing to me that GrandCentral is even still around, unless Google wants to do something with it when Android comes out I don’t see any value in the service.

By: Case Study on the Cost of Downtime: GrandCentral | IT's About Uptime - The StackSafe Blog

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:10:13 +0000

[...] service was unavailable, TechCrunch broke the story with a title that sums up the general response: GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead. The Consumerist added a similar perspective that GrandCentral’s communication on the outage was [...]

By: lori Holmes

lori Holmes — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:59:56 +0000

BEWARE OF FREE… you get what you pay for! PhoneFusion one rocks… and is affordable.

By: RITH311

RITH311 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:37:50 +0000

I guess you get what you pay for. I use Phone.com and have never had a problem. The service is awesome, the flexibility unmatched, and if they were to have any trouble I know I could call their 24 hour support to get my questions answered.

By: Maggard

Maggard — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:07:17 +0000

One person unavailable and nothing can get said to the customers? That’s how you folks handle corporate communications? Let me guess, only the CIO has keys to the server cage, and Marge in Accounting has the front door key ‘cause she’s always in first?

Not only did you folks drop the ball, you’ve now substituted it with a grenade and posted the pin-pulling.

Unlike the I-want-shiny-new-things crowd I’ll be happy with a trusting feeling towards you folks with my phone calls & messages–which I’m definitely losing. Sunday I was calling a buddy to make him a business offer, each time my call was dropped. I finally used his work number and got through to him, but now I wonder who mighta been calling my forwarded-to-GC numbers that I didn’t hear from.

Not warm & fuzzy right now.

By: S.P.

S.P. — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:46:03 +0000

@CRAIG of GRANDCENTRAL:

With $50 million acquisition from Google, you guys still sounded like a two men show or mom or pop business.

—Did you notice that if Craig is not in, other people cannot post on blog?
—Did you notice that they “selectively” publish customer’s comment on their blog?
—Does that mean these two men pocketed the cash and now have no incentive at all to further develop it?
—Wake up all the customers, stop using GrandCentral, and back to your own real thing that works. Hype is hype, don’t take that risk anymore.

It’s a deal to make a few rich with no hope for its customers.

By: MeatyREADS » Blog Archive » Twitter is the First News

MeatyREADS » Blog Archive » Twitter is the First News — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:13:47 +0000

[...] of TechCrunch says: It’s clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media. No one has created an application yet that [...]

By: Pandrogas

Pandrogas — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:16:29 +0000

For $50 Million, couldn’t they have gotten a generator and some gas? I mean, California, a state famous for rolling blackouts, and they don’t have a generator?

By: El blog de Luis Miguel García : El problema de estar atado a una tecnología

El blog de Luis Miguel García : El problema de estar atado a una tecnología — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:58:21 +0000

[...] en su servicio de número de teléfono único, GrandCentral, recientemente ha sufrido problemas y ha dejado a unos cuantos usuarios sin poder recibir llamadas durante toda una mañana. Si [...]

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:49:39 +0000

Me and a friend in Boston both have GC. In fact we’ve had it for at least a year. How the hell does service get worse AFTER Google buys it??? GC is supposed to be up and running, but he and I are both still down. I call him (or the other way around) and it rings - then VM. But it never rings on our actual phones.
I know its free. But this is ridiculous. I have watched things get worse and worse since GC was bought by Google. It doesnt seem they take this beta very seriously.

By: Anthenor

Anthenor — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:15:54 +0000

It would be an opportunity for Digitrad to launch its service in the US. The offer is close to Grandcentral solution, Digitrad started in France to market free multimedia phone numbers with a call forwarding to your mobile and more than 130 other destinations. The great point is that you can use your phone number to call these 130 destinations for free.
http://yes.digitrad.com
It will soon be in english and provide other EU numbers, why not US ?

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:16:38 +0000

Yes, GrandCentral still says “beta” — but so does Gmail, and I’m certain Google is happy to have so many rely on its services despite those labels. Plus, GrandCentral’s promise from more than a year ago (prior to its acquisition by Google) was that it would soon be out of beta, with a paid version for those who wanted all of its features.

This weekend’s outage is certainly not the first problem GrandCentral has had in the past year. In recent months, outgoing greetings were deleted and voice mails were inaccessible. At least once, GrandCentral actually lost (and was unable to recover) voice mails.

While no system is perfect, I agree communications have been awful. Features promised long ago are still not available, Google’s acquisition seems to have added nothing to the service, and a GrandCentral blog entry from two months ago (Feb. 10, 2008) promising “a lot of new features in the works” that they would be “rolling… out quickly” apparently has not materialized.

With such poor communication, lack of visible progress and too many problems, one has to wonder about the future of GrandCentral — though I’d like to be hopeful.

By: Eman

Eman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:32:28 +0000

Definitely inconvenient…but…it does still say “beta!”, right?

By: Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:06:42 +0000

Come on guys, let’s get some perspective. It’s a free service that was down for a few hours. Life still goes on.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:42:10 +0000

@ Frank Church:

“you are the type of whiner that makes it necessary for me to spend extra for things b/c the average cost to support people like you drives the cost for a low-maintenance customer like me higher.”

Frank, I think you may have mistaken my tone, which wasn’t about whining, but was about candid feedback on the service, without taking any snarky or belittling tone of voice.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:34:51 +0000

@75 Alan

BINGO!

By: doug

doug — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:21:04 +0000

“Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier.”

Unfortunately, this makes GrandCentral sound like a one-man “dude with a colo box” outfit.

Don’t they have tech support? Marketing? PR? Anybody besides a cofounder who can respond to clients during a service outage?

By: exapted

exapted — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:56:40 +0000

He was up in the mountains with the family? Give me a break. I don’t run a Google Application, and I am more connected than he is.

By: johns

johns — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:44:26 +0000

Everytime these COLO outages pop up and affect real time services, I know who hasn’t heard of hot backups.