Yahoo is making some noise this morning, and it has got nothing to do with Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Rupert Murdoch, and Sue Decker. Yahoo says that their Yahoo! Go 2.0 software, that allows you to access various Yahoo services on your mobile phones is ready for primetime. (Press Release is here.)
The new version of Yahoo! Go 2.0 launches on Friday and will be available for more than 200 different mobile phones in the US by the end of July, expanding to more than 400 by end of year. It will also be pre-loaded on new devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC that begin rolling out later this year.
The software will “launch” on Friday but won’t be available till end of July and in many cases till end of the year. So it isn’t exactly primetime! Right now pretty much every phone you might want to try the service on says “Coming Soon.” Is this announcement just a diversionary tactic, to distract from the fact that many members of Yahoo! Go’s mobile group are quietly leaving, looking for greener pastures?
I think they are launching on a few phones Friday. Adding support to more phones by the end of July. In the mobile world, basically every phone you launch on needs to be ported to, and device preloads have to be set up months and months in advance. This doesn’t really seem like a diversionary tactic to me.
Om is that true? What evidence do you have that people are leaving? From my little window on the world it looks like Yahoo is very aggressively recruiting and growing fast.. Who is wrong? 🙂
If you have friends in Yahoo London Mobile group, check it out – i know of six people personally who have left, and there are some others looking 🙂
i would never doubt my readers – so you could be right.
Y! Mobile London office is just marketing and BD. The majority of the Y! Go work is done out of Hamburg Germany.
Y! Go is J2ME and porting J2ME sucks, but that shouldn’t be the excuse of hyping something “coming soon”.
Kool, it will look good on the iphone.
In addition to the group in Germany, there are a bunch of guys in Sunnyvale as well. Haven’t heard of any of them leaving either.
I don’t suppose it will interface nicely with GMail will it? 🙂
one the people leaving thread – guys, i know of more than half a dozen people first hand, so it is happening. their names, unfortunately aren’t something i can share.
@NP: You haven’t heard anyone from Sunnyvale Mobile team leaving because it’s a new team. All older Yahoo! Mobile folks are gone.
Will this web site be supported with audio/vidio on the Nokia N800. It’s presently using Windows Media Player.
let’s face it – the yahoo! go software that IS available is terrible. have any of you tried it? it LOOKS beautiful, but is slow and runs like a giant bloated piece of Microsoft software. yahoo! mobile continues to squander a great market position. maybe, like microsoft they’ll eventually get it right, but it won’t be this go around…
I tried Yahoo Go! on my Nokia phone and it was a complete disaster. It was very slow. It froze all the time. A completely wretched experience I would not recommend to anybody.
I am never going to use anything from Yahoo on my mobile. If a company with billions of dollars can’t even create an acceptable working piece of software on a mobile phone (note: companies with fewer people and less money have done it already), there’s something very wrong in the organization.
Totally agreed on the “that isn’t the way to launch” concept. I happen to like Yahoo! Go and use it frequently on my Samsung Blackjack. It’s v1, and I’ve been interested in v2 since its announcement at the beginning of the year.
At first, Yahoo! said it would be “available in April.” Then it became, “Coming Soon.” Then comes this marketing push about all the work that’s been done to improve it.
What gives, Yahoo!? What happened to the promises you made before? Crappy expectations setting… where have we heard this before? Oh YEAH! Yahoo!…
Ugh.