Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) newly-minted CEO Carol Bartz has been on an open-ended tear recently, admitting what is broken at the company and even admitting that she uses a competitor's mapping product instead of the one produced by the company she now leads.
That's all well and good, but real change needs to come forth at Yahoo! for the company to know what it is supposed to be doing. Bartz has 2009 to prove that change is not being talked about, but is happening.
One of the most glossed-over but important changes is the way Yahoo! sits in the mobile space. Yes, the bulk of online advertising is still going online within the PC screen, but the sheer quantity of mobile handsets makes the wireless phone an incredible frontier to be on. As in, now. Europe's largest wireless carrier, Vodafone, may be close to installing Yahoo! mobile search as the default search application on its handsets, according to in-progress talks.
Yahoo! needs this. With Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) being the largest partner with Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone and having T-Mobile's G1 smartphone being completely Google-powered, Yahoo! needs a large-scale partnership right now in the mobile space. If it doesn't get a few big partnerships landed, Google may be on its way to beating it in the mobile space as well.
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