While Google and Microsoft have been trying hard to dominate the mobile market by launching their own handsets, their competitor Yahoo! has refrained from treading down that path.
In an interview with Forbes magazine, Yahoo!’s senior Vice President, David Ko said that according to him, the best way to increase the mobile business is through mobile ads, apps and partnerships.
Ko says that Yahoo! is now focusing on building their mobile business by developing new Apps for users. They already have Apps such as Yahoo! Finance and Fantasy Sports on the iPhone and BlackBerry. They are now also working on Apps for Android and they want to add some really different and special features rather than just copying the features of other websites as they want to deliver high quality content and services.
Yahoo! is better off collaborating with mobile phone manufacturing companies like Nokia and Samsung rather than to compete with them. He feels that through such collaboration they can directly get access to the huge customer base which these mobile phone giants already have, rather than make your own handset and start building your customer base from scratch, after having invested large sums of money to design and manufacture the phone.
The decision to stay away from manufacturing of mobile phones seems to be a good one considering the fact that both their competitors Google and Microsoft have only recently announced that they would discontinue the manufacture and sale of their own handsets, Nexus and Kin respectively. Analysts say this decision is based on the fact that the sales have not been as good as expected.
