IDC: Yahoo Should Focus on Mobile

IDC said in a report released Wednesday on Jerry Yang‘s resignation as Yahoo CEO that mobile advertising needs to be a strategic focus for the venerable Web portal, according to MediaPost. “It is now that future market shares and mobile media brands are being created, yet Yahoo is falling behind Google,” said the report.

In addition, IDC recommends that Yahoo doesn’t need a branded phone or new mobile operating system like Android, but that they should instead focus on improving their existing Yahoo Go platform. “Even the new Go 3.0 still renders many standard Web pages hardly usable, lacks email attachments, instant messaging support, access to Yahoo Calendar, and direct access to Yahoo Contacts,” according to the report.

The fact is, mobile needs to be a key focus for every major online company. With 250 million active subscriptions in the U.S. alone—over 80 percent of the population—nearly everyone is already carrying a cell phone. And nearly all of the latest models are media capable. Yahoo already knows this; they’ve been in the mobile space for several years. They just need to kick it up a notch; their mobile platform suffers from the same lack of focus and multiple, vaguely-defined efforts as their desktop Web platform.

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