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.

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.

With Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) stock in the dumper, the CEO spot looking for a newcomer and musings about the future of the company underway, perhaps there is a small bright light for the internet pioneer. Wireless provider T-Mobile will use Yahoo!'s mobile search as the default on all its phones' mobile web browsers.

While that may not be the biggest victory one can think of, it does help. Mobile search and web browsing has been increasing in usage (though still small), and although T-Mobile USA is only the nation's fourth-largest mobile provider, just the fact that Yahoo!'s services will keep the largest wireless providers from using competitive mobile search products is a blessing for Yahoo!

Making money from mobile web search is another matter. Although Yahoo! and T-Mobile said they will share revenue from the new arrangement, the question is this: are any mobile search companies and wireless providers making any significant revenue from mobile search partnering? At this point in time, it's hard to see that just based on skimpy usage. While it may not be that way in the future. T-Mobile International, which replaced Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) mobile search with Yahoo!'s solution earlier in 2008 and Yahoo! also has its fingers in mobile search with the largest wireless provider in the U.S., AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T). Perhaps Yahoo!'s rebirth will be around mobile technology after all. It's just a question of when.