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Re:Updates to our Google Voice apps by mark212 on Monday January 23, 2017 @04:23PM (#13466174)
no, they bought a company called Grand Central in 2007 and re-branded it as Voice. This was well before Fi. A couple of the key players from GC left to form Uber Conference in 2012 which was then rebranded as Dialpad with backing from Google Ventures.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/inventor-of-google-voice-n...

Re:Updates to our Google Voice apps by fader on Monday January 23, 2017 @05:16PM (#13466632)
They also stripped out many of the amazing features from Grand Central and then left Google Voice to rot for years, slowly degrading.

How they handled Voice (and so many other services) has moved me from being a huge Google fan to someone who immediately starts looking for a replacement when Google buys a company whose services I use. It's almost a guarantee that they'll lose interest in running a service once something else new and shiny comes along.