Remember Yahoo!?? Yup, that same company that once was an email and search powerhouse before being outflanked by the likes of Google, Apple and others with new revolutionary technologies.
Yahoo! has survived the onslaught from competitors with the dark days, when it was a target of buyout bids from giants such as Microsoft in 2008, long gone.
Today the company maintains accounts of millions of users with many more signing up due to the company’s successful revamp of its services which are now even more mobile friendly allowing for easy accessibility through smartphone devices.
With the company increasingly concentrating on fine tuning its services for mobile devices, the rumour mill is rife with suggestions that the California based web giant is looking to enter the highly lucrative smartphone market.
Baby steps towards this ambitious and probable project have already been taken by Yahoo!.
Yahoo! has been focussing on ensuring its popular online services, such as Mail and Flickr, are fully compatible with mobile devices while in Japan the company has made available its own branded device.
The Japanese market is one of the few where Yahoo! still maintains hegemony and Softbank, a major shareholder in Yahoo’s Japanese operations, has gone ahead with releasing a Yahoo! branded phone which is optimised to run the web portals services.
Just a few years ago the idea that Yahoo! will be looking to release a smartphone would have been bordering on insanity but today it looks likelier than ever that the former king of the internet may look to regain past glories with an entrance into the smartphone market.
If Yahoo! does take the plunge it will be a huge risk but a risk that will need to be taken anyway in the future as the company needs to turn around its fortunes.
Yahoo! has the users, the applications, and the services, all it needs is hardware and an OS. For both the company can take Google’s route by buying up a startup to build the mobile OS while it can partner with hardware developers to build the device.
The future is mobile and if Yahoo! wants to return back to play with the big boys, the best bet for the company is to go mobile.
It will be a huge risk but the time for Yahoo! to play it safe has long gone.
Source: TNW
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