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The invisibility of Yahoo Everywhere on Yahoo's homepage for wired surfers is just one big, fat example of a wireless strategy that hasn't jelled yet. The service isn't as good as that of competitors like Strategy.com. It's difficult to use the regular Yahoo to order information that is then delivered to you on the run. So the promise of flexibility that is the whole point of Yahoo Everywhere isn't there yet. And the failure to use what Yahoo itself regularly assures us is the most valuable advertising space on the Internet to promote what could be the next technology revolution suggests that Yahoo, as hard as it is to believe, doesn't seem to get it. POTENTIAL GOLD MINE. It's a big mistake: More than 300 million people are expected to tap the Net over wireless connections by 2003, according to International Data Corp. That's about the same number of people who will surf the Web from their computers. Hello? The mobile market is a potential gold mine for Yahoo. The people who want to go online from their phones are exactly the kind of dedicated Net surfers who know and trust Yahoo. Clearly, the company has a tremendous brand name and loads of respect from the Internet's most active users. There is one good reason that Yahoo hasn't been aggressively promoting its wireless services: They're not very good yet. Consider one example of the information Yahoo will zip out to your mobile phone or other device. At Yahoo Everywhere, you can sign up to get the midday or close price of any stock you want sent to your mobile phone. So you can find out stock prices for AT&T or Lucent or any other company you may care about. That doesn't sound bad until you look at the alternatives. For example, Strategy.com delivers much more than just closing or midday prices. You can get alerts when AT&T moves 10% -- or 5%, for that matter. You can find out when analysts change their recommendations on the stock. And you can get an alert if the company reports earnings that are different from analysts' expectations. Yahoo doesn't offer any of these extras. FOURTH CHOICE. That's not the only way Yahoo is behind. Increasingly, mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) will let people browse certain sites on the Web. Yahoo has made much of the fact that it has inked dozens of partnerships with companies like AT&T and Palm to get on the mobile devices the partners sell. But it's not clear how valuable those placements are for Yahoo. Consider AT&T's new Web-browsing phones, on which powerful Yahoo gets less-than-prominent billing. The device lets you look up information like general news or financial headlines. But under general news, ABC.com is the first choice, followed by USA Today.com. Yahoo is the fourth choice -- for good reason: Most of its items are pulled from news services like Reuters. Similarly, under finance, Yahoo is fifth, after more prominent news providers such as CBS MarketWatch. There's no question Yahoo would like to be a major player in the wireless Internet market. Last June, it spent $80 million to acquire Online Anywhere and to get the services of its very capable CEO, Mohan Vishwanath. But the company doesn't seem to be paying enough attention to its mobile efforts. It needs to change its attitude quickly or risk getting left behind. Putting Yahoo Everywhere on the portal's front page would be a good way to start. Senior Writer Elstrom covers the wireless Web from New York |
