Earlier this month, Apple (AAPL) rejected an application for the iPhone called Google Voice. The uproar set off a chain of events—Google’s (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigating wireless open access and handset exclusivity—that may finally end the 135-year-old Alexander Graham Bell era. It’s about time.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

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Before the last of Wall Street gets sold off as day-old fish on Fulton Street or washed into the East River altogether, it’s worth asking, what is Wall Street these days anyway? Thanks to Dick Grasso and CNBC, most of us think of Wall Street as balding men in ugly solid-colored suits yelling at each other and throwing litter on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Not even close.

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Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It’s never good to overpay. But the software giant–whose stock has flat-lined for eight years–was on to the right strategy in looking to the Web for growth. Can’t Microsoft build something on its own? Why the rush to pay billions for Yahoo? The simple (and wrong) answer was that adding Yahoo’s 20% Web search market share to Microsoft’s 10% meant that it could compete against Google’s 60% share. Technology changes too fast for that to make sense except on paper.
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