A Google executive has said that the search giant has only scratched the surface of what it plans to do with cloud-based offerings like Google Voice according to eWeek. Google Voice currently has over 1.4 million users, but is still a far cry from Skype's 500 million users. The big difference between Skype and Google Voice (GV) is that GV users need phone service and Skype users don't.

That major difference will eventually go away though; in 2010 Google plans to add VoIP service to Google Voice. The new VoIP service will allow GV users to place calls via the internet to other PCs and to landline and mobile phones. The capability will come to GV courtesy of the purchase of soft phone maker Gizmo5 in November.

Google won’t get specific on what it plans to do with Gizmo5 integration, but Google's Bradley Horowitz told eWeek, "What we're trying to do with telephony is give people a seamless experience that frees up their telephony communication from the silos where it's lived for the last decade. Voicemail, my contacts, all of those things have been segregated from the rest of my Web experience. We have big plans to do a better job."

Google sees GV being highly integrated with voice mail transcription, inbox integration, and threaded SMS along with lots more across all of a user's phones and contact sources. The experience will be optimized for functionality on any device form a computer with a large screen to a connected wristwatch.

Horowitz also talked about Google's cloud computing plans for 2010 saying, "We want to build the cloud in such a way that it's got all of the qualities you would want. You want it to be blazingly fast. You want it to be accessible wherever you are on the planet within milliseconds. You want it to be accessible on whatever device you happen to be at, whether that's an enormous big-screen monitor, or whether something the size of a wristwatch. You want it to be transparent and flow across services and devices without you having to think about or program it."

There have been notable incidents this year that have undermined the appeal of cloud computing in many minds. Most notable the fiasco with lost data for Sidekick customers. Ultimately, most of the user data was returned, but not before the image of cloud, computing was tarnished.