Yahoo! CEO Bartz keeps eye on mobile offerings

Posted Mar 28th 2009 1:40PM by Brian White
Filed under: Products and Services, Yahoo! (YHOO)

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz may be starting to give Yahoo!'s mobile offerings the attention they deserve after former CEO and company co-founder Jerry Yang treated mobile like an "isolated startup." Although Yahoo!'s presence in the mobile internet market has been respectable recently, that doesn't mean that it's been completed integrated with Yahoo!'s nonmobile universe.

Instead of taking its brands and products to the mobile web and handset application arena, Yahoo! has developed very cool but isolated products for the mobile universe. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), on the other hand, has taken its enormously-popular web-based products and has ported them better and better to the mobile web.

Google has taken the strategy of building the product and base on the web first, then leveraging that product (and hopefully, that user base) to mobile later. Yahoo!'s "mobile sandbox" approach works, but there is very little to no leverage.

Yahoo!'s mobile teams will be required to work more closely with Yahoo!'s actual product team under Bartz. It's 2009, so it's about time, yes? Yahoo!'s mobile partnerships are as strong globally as anyone's so the audience growth potential is there for the taking.

Tags: carol bartz, inthenews, yahoo, yahoo go, yahoo mobile, yhoo