Google Voice is a great service, grown up from the acquisition of Grand Central a couple years ago. When Google acquired Gizmo 5 last year, many of us who use Google Voice and benefit from its features got excited: Maybe they were on the cusp of bringing Google Voice to the desktop.

And the masses began to rejoice.

Well, unfortunately TechCrunch is reporting today that the Google Voice desktop app, which has apparently been confirmed as being reality and in testing internally at Google, may not see the light of day. Arrington suggests the reasons for that may be religious/philosophical in nature and that the team has been directed to look at building a web app instead.

And if that's true, well then that is a very sad thing, indeed.

So, Google - Let me be the voice of just one customer who has touted the service and used it extensively... one customer who says please - please - consider the situation for your end users here. We can benefit today from a desktop client and there are many use cases where a browser doesn't make the best sense. There are several recent examples of desktop/installed software coming out of Google, and Google Voice is one place where it just makes good sense to do a desktop app. And I should also point out that by releasing a Google Voice desktop app, there's nothing preventing Google from working hard to develop a strong and powerful HTML 5 app for the future - In fact, I would hope and bet good money you're already doing just that, as well!

We really want a Google Voice desktop app, and we really want it from Google. Please, if there's any actual debate over the right's and wrong's of delivering a desktop client, reconsider your position and make some happy customers very happy. And, when a HTML 5 app becomes workable and available we'll certainly cheer about that as well because we'll use it, too.

Thanks.