Apple Enables The Mobile Internet On iPhones; Yahoo's After A Bigger Market
After Apple's (NSDQ: AAPL) SDK event, I drove north to Sunnyvale to meet up with Yahoo's (NSDQ: YHOO) mobile group. I figured since I was in the neighborhood, and I'm from Seattle, I might as well make the most out of the trip. As I headed into the meeting with Steve Boom, Yahoo's SVP of Broadband and Mobile, it was my goal to understand Yahoo's mobile strategy, which has trickled out over the past year. As an unintentional outcome, I also found myself bouncing off what Yahoo was telling me with what Apple said earlier that day. What I learned is that both companies are trying to bring the Internet to the mobile phone, but in entirely different ways.
One of the first things Steve Jobs said on stage was that 71 percent of mobile browsing in the U.S. is conducted by Safari. "The iPhone is bringing the Internet to a mobile device for the first time," he declared. That's clearly a lot of usage and reach, but one might argue Yahoo's goals are much grander. In a nutshell, Yahoo wants to be on every phone, not just the iPhone. By the end of the year, Apple guesses it will have about 10 million handsets in the market. Compare that to Yahoo, which can potentially reach 600 million subscribers today.
At that size, Boom said it's a big enough market for applications and advertising to become truly successful. That's also why he found it interesting that John Doerr, partner of world-famous VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said they were committing $100 million to a fund exclusively for iPhone applications (what could be conceived as a relatively small market). "The opportunity of the mobile Internet is much bigger than the iPhone???that's why I was very interested in the Kleiner Perkins fund. I'm interested in them focusing a fund specifically on the iPhone...but in order for the Internet to take off, it can't be limited to big companies like Yahoo, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple."
Since we've been inundated with Apple news thanks to last Thursday's event, take a minute to catch-up on Yahoo's mobile strategy, which isn't lucky enough to have a $100 million fund backing it.
Yahoo has three segments to its overall mobile strategy:
1. To build the best starting points for consumers on the mobile Internet.
2. To be the "must-buy" for advertisers, by having the broadest and best audience.
3. To provide an open platform to promote Yahoo services.
Yahoo has three consumer applications:
1. oneSearch: A search bar, launched in January 2007, that tries to provide answers for what you are looking for. For instance, type in a celebrity's name, you'll get the latest news about that person. Type in a company's name, and you'd get stock quotes.
2. oneConnect: It's a communications hub, where users can check, mail, SMS, social networks all in one. Announced at Mobile World Congress; expected to ship in Q2.
3. onePlace: Stores a person's content, such as information on their interests that's consistently updated in the background. Announced this week; should ship in Q2.
This is where it gets a little confusing. On top of all of that is Yahoo! Go, the delivery mechanism for Yahoo's widget strategy, where third-party apps can be found, or Yahoo's oneSearch, oneConnect and onePlace. Yahoo's widget strategy allows third-party developers to use their code to write applications once to work on multiple phones, whether it's in a browser, in a downloaded version of Yahoo Go, or in a native client, such as a carrier's deck. That's the golden promise that everyone's platform is trying to fulfill. But realistically, it means developers will still have to support multiple platforms. Boom said: "We will continue to be aggressive in mobile. We have the opportunity to win on the future of the Internet, which is mobile. We aren't saying when, but we are predicting that there will be more users on mobile than the PC???and today we have 1/2 a billion users on the PC. It's a pretty lofty objective."
As for Apple's plans to help developers sell apps through a widget on the iPhone, and in return take a cut of the revenues, that's not Yahoo's next step. Boom: "We have no plans to do paid-for widgets. If there was demand from developers, we'd consider it, but it is not our intention to become the merchant of record on mobile ... We are not creating an alternative deck, we are creating a kick-ass Internet experience."
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