After all, the money it's on google's web operations, which the phones could be based on.

 Reply

The highlight of those days was the Yahoo pager co-branded with RIM and requiring users to pay for an expensive one of a kind pager that used a service that they (RIM at least) were careful to point out didn't represent the level of service you would get with a true RIM pager.

The service didn't work. Not in Washington DC, not in the LA area, and certainly not in marginal coverage areas.

About one message in ten actually got through, but there was no feedback about which ones did or didn't, so almost no "conversation" made sense and by the time you realized most of your messages weren't getting though you just gave up and made a phone call.

I still use Yahoo services when something is available in no other form (certain Yahoo groups), and only if it is both free, and not defendant on a third party provider.

These "joint" marketing arrangements I think must be the product of mid-level managers at Yahoo and the other companies getting together and after smoking a joint and then blue-skying some ideas about what would be cool without any idea how to implement them.

Then the techies have to hurriedly throw together something that superficially resembles the spec.

Whatever Yahoo did with a phone at this point would look second rate compared with the iPhone and Android.

There is a niche available for someone to vend a cheap (or even free) advertising based phone, but whoever does it will lose money for a long long time and jeopardize their ability to do business with many companies (that they will suddenly be undercutting). Google is certainly positioned for this already. Remains to be seen whether they will pull the trigger.

 Reply