Yahoo! – Wrong villain

Google is a bad choice. Apple would be a better fit.

• Marissa Mayer seems to want to get out of the company’s agreement with Microsoft and go instead with Google.
• It is not a big surprise that the relationship with Microsoft is not going well as the deal was frankly a messy alternative to acquisition.
• However, getting into bed with Google is a worse idea.
• In the short-term it might increase revenues as Google’s indexing is far better than Microsoft’s, but this looks very dangerous when one considers the bigger picture.  
• Yahoo! has a good presence in the fixed internet world and badly needs to leverage that into mobile.
• To effectively do that it needs to put together an experience from the assets it has and the assets it is acquiring.
• It needs viable competitors to gmail, Google talk, Google+ and so on and so forth.
• Great mobile services will keep users inside the Yahoo! ecosystem and there Yahoo! will be able to learn about those users and monetise them.
• Google knows this and I can be sure that it does not want Yahoo! to make a success of that.
• A dollar that Yahoo! earns from monetising mobile internet usage is a dollar lost to Google.
• Hence, it is in Google’s interest to see Yahoo! fail in mobile and for that reason it is a bad idea to get into bed with Google on search.
• Ironically, Yahoo! would be much better off staying with Microsoft for search and looking at a relationship with Apple.
• Apple’s own services are very poor and recent events are adding to the pile of evidence suggesting that Apple is not good at innovating in this area.
• Hence, some form of exclusive deal between Yahoo! and Apple would see Yahoo! get its services onto mobile devices and Apple would have something exclusive to it to make up for the weakness of its own services.
• My suspicion is that Apple has decided to go for home grown exclusive services but Apple Maps shows that this is much harder than it sounds.
• Furthermore, I suspect that Yahoo! does not want to limit itself to only being on iOS devices.
• Hence, I think that any kind of relationship unlikely but it is a combination that makes more sense than teaming up with Google.
• Therefore, I do not rule it out completely.
• Yahoo! is my dark horse in the mobile ecosystem arena but there remains a very long way to go before I get really excited.