Google trying to muscle into Skype's space

Yesterday morning Google posted an entry in their Gmail blog announcing, I guess for their North American customers, anyhow, the new feature for making free phone calls from directly within Gmail.

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

The comparison table lines up Google's prices against the "Leading internet telephony provider". Gotta be Skype right? In which case this is very misleading.

At Adept we use Skype almost exclusively. For $3/month per user account, we can make unlimited calls (up to 10,000 minutes per month, max 6 hrs per day, under their "fair usage policy") to anywhere in the US or Canada. For 10 Euros per month we can make unlimited calls to landlines in more than 40 countries. Depending on one's phone usage, the Skype plans probably work out cheaper.

Not to mention that Skype-to-Skype calls anywhere in the world are free, and include software that allows for sharing your desktop for viewing by the other party. This is how most of our techie colleagues communicate with us. For free. Including being able to show what we're talking about.

We're also curious to know if Google is making similar offers to folks outside the US -- please comment if you know anything on this question. Not only is Skype a local contender in 1/5 of the countries on Earth, but if one lives in a country not on their list, one can always sign up for a plan that originates in a country other than where one happens to be physically located. For example, if Adept opens an Amsterdam office (a dream we hold dear), we can obtain a Netherlands phone number and answer it here in New York City.

Google, you've gotta do a bit better, we'll be watching.