IP Democracy: Yahoo!'s Ho-Hum CES Announcements

Yahoo!'s co-founder, current CEO and "Chief Yahoo!" Jerry Yang offered a keynote presentation at CES today (video here), unveiling a series of new product tweaks, particularly in the mobile arena, while offering a "vision of the future." Maybe I'm a little bored by Yahoo! these days, but the news was relatively underwhelming.

Clearly Yahoo! is aiming to pump up its mobile advantages because the still-beleaguered Sunnyvale Internet giant got a lot of mileage out of some fairly predictable -- and to my taste slightly squishy -- announcements in the mobile arena. Yahoo! unveiled a new mobile home page to be "the essential starting point for mobile consumers," launched Yahoo! Go 3.0, the latest iteration of its all-in-one mobile platform and agreed to open up its mobile set-up to third party developers through a Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform.

During his keynote, Yang said that Yahoo! wants to become "the best starting point for the entire web" and offer "anything and everything users need online." He proceeded to demo not actual products but conceptual products that Yahoo! might offer, such as an email application that can prioritize messages while linking to all kinds of useful stuff, such as maps and reviews, all from the inbox.

In a very crowded mobile universe, Yahoo!'s Go 3.0, even if slicker and smarter than earlier revisions, is just one of dozens of dizzying mobile application choices. And it's hard to judge whether the enhancements, which seem relatively wispy in the grand scheme of things ("more intuitive interfaces," for example) will set the world on fire.

Basically Yang seemed to outline ongoing, incremental, evolutionary improvements in Yahoo!'s offerings rather than any barn-burning development. Once observer politely characterized Yahoo!'s mobile announcements as a "standard pitch." I wouldn't say standard as much as bland, so bland that I can't work up a good head of steam on anything Yahoo!-related. At bottom, a ho-hum day for Yahoo! at CES.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 7, 2008 6:56 PM to IP Democracy