Yesterday, in a post addressing things that don't work, I mentioned GrandCentral. You can read what I had to say about it here, but I want to be fair, so I'm posting this to talk just about GrandCentral alone. Also, GrandCentral is in beta and I need to be fair to them. Yesterday I wasn't. Lots of things can change between beta and production, and I'm sure they will.

My key observations were negative, and to be clear, I'm not impressed. Here were the key points from yesterday's post.

• The web site doesn't like Firefox and forced me to abandon my browser of choice. That's, in my view, irresponsible. and not web friendly. It's pre-Web 1.0 mentality.
• It required me to enable ActiveX controls that I have shut off for security reasons. Again, irresponsible. And it asks me to implicitly trust someone who's trying to win my business. Just doesn't seem smart.
• When it imported my Outlook address book, it imported everything. No user controls for what contacts I wanted to import. It took them all. First, I want controls. Second, if there's no telephone number populated in any of those fields, be smart enough to know that putting it in my telephone list on Grand Central adds clutter, but no value. None. Don't make me the user do manual edit cleanup that could easill been handled with a useful import routine. Take a lesson from any of the hundreds of companies that do this the right way.
• My personal complaint that I really don't want or need yet another telephone number.

Andy Abramson, someone whose opinion I value pretty highly, is keen on Grand Central. He posted a follow up this morning, and I want to give his thoughts due credit. They may work for you where they don't for me. Remember, this is the Internet...the information superhighway. Your mileage may vary.

Here are a couple of Andy's points -

Maybe because I've had Webley for years, which was an additional phone number, and an 800 number no less, I'm a bit more sanguine on the subject. I mean, for 8 years I've used Webley and no one has had  to call (or known) my 800 number existed. I used call forwarding to send my known number to webley and created my own find me/follow me on steroids that didn't mean I had to go check tons of voice mail.

Ok, I can buy this, but I have to dissect it too. Webley didn't ever excite me enought to even try, but on Andy's positive post, this time I signed up for the trial. Grand Central gives me a number. I tell them my phone numbers. Then I forward my cell phone, for example, to Grand Central, so that it can run a rules engine to route calls to my cell phone? There's a terribly cluttered, inelegant aspect to that. In network parlance, I call it needless backhaul. Putting traffic back and forth across the network without, to me, good reason. It doesn't feel innovative, creative or Voice 2.0ish to me.

Andy said with Grand Central he "created my own find me/follow me on steroids."  In some ways, maybe it's the Luddite in me, I want to ask - why? My cell phone is in my pocket and on 24X7. People who need to reach me know how. I've had find me/follow me simply by being accessible via cell phone for years. And if I don't want you to find/follow me, I'll turn it to silent. Or off. So what I have to ask is are we creating a feature because we need it? Or are we creating a feature because we can? I want things I need, but I don't want gadgetry and wizardry for their own sake. Clearly there's value to some, but I can't find it for me. And I'm cut from a swatch of users that's pretty common really.

In an earlier post, Andy said -

What I like about GrandCentral is the *8 code. That their quick key for making telemarketer calls the same as SPAM and sending them to your SPAM folder at GrandCentral.

So maybe I'm fortunate. How many calls from telemarketers do you really get these days? Andy must get more than I do. I consider telemarketer calls stress relief. I have a whistle, and airhorn, and can fabricate an attack of Asperger's Syndrome on demand. And sometimes I'll toy with them like a small boy pulling the legs off a spider. I can be cruel taht way. But the truth is, across my array of telephone numbers, I get far more wrong number calls in a month than telemarketers. To me, it sounds like a solution to a non-existent pain point. Again, your mileage may vary.

I see Grand Central as having potential. There's an inkling of something there that might be worthwhile. But as a user, a customer so to speak, I feel like I have to hunt for what it is. If I have to find the value, and I have to create the value in how I figure out to use it, I'm not sure I like that value proposition a whole lot. I'm not sure that it's a sustainable business model.

I guess for me, that's the real weak point. The value proposition isn't clear and, for me, didn't quite match up to the highlights on the main web page. And I'm probably not the target demographic. But to figure that out, I went the the pain of setting it all up. So I invested time and effort for, what seems to be, no return. So the RoE ratio seems way off.

Let's make a quick comparision to another company Andy and I have both mentioned, jangl. One bias I admit to up front is that an old friend and former customer is the VP of engineering at jangl. But when I look at jangl, the value propostion  is so clear it's in your face. I know instantly I'm not their target demographic. Sure I still want to check it out, but I know who their audience is and what their business model is. It makes sense and it's out in the open.

So with jangl, I understand the value and clearly see it's not for me. Yet I'm excited and think it's pretty cool stuff. That isn't all just based on a friend working there. I've got friends in leadership roles with companies that I think suck dirty pond water too.

To be fair, I'll watch GrandCentral. It's not likely I'll watch as an active beta user, because I "don't get it" when it comes to figuring out what it can do for me. For some folks, I'm sure it will bring a huge value


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