Yahoo Getting Hung Up By The Carriers

Of late, the usually forward and information giving Yahoo executives have been playing "mums the word" on anything and everything. They've gone into a professionally counseled and constructed defensive PR mode, commenting on things through their high priced handlers, making only well choreographed statements, and doing their best to provide an altered state of reality, all under the guise of investor relations over public relations.

Gone are the days of blogger briefings. Responses to IM's by friends employed there are nill, and dare I say, even appearances at industry events are non-existant. In a nutshell, Yahoo's not talking.

<Om's post yesterday about the Rogers Braodband deal being adjusted, and reports of deals here with Verizon and AT&T being reworked all lead to an ironic conclusion. The spider has captured the fly. For years Yahoo was the fixation of the carriers. Yahoo's big marketing engine, fueled by ad sales, eyeballs and investor envy all made them the wanted darling. But like the moth to the flame, Yahoo's access game with the carriers became their undoing. Neither Verizon nor AT&T took Yahoo's moves into VoIP via Yahoo Messenger seriously. By that, they didn't want it. Both AT&T and Verizon in the past year have added Counterpath's Eyebeam as a soft client, yet both have portal relationships with Yahoo, and yet, Yahoo Messenger, which has voice capabilities, and some parts of Counterpath originally licensed for it, inside, didn't even have an eyelash batted at it.

No. The carriers at some level have decided that Yahoo is really their competition, a comment raised a few years back at an FMC summit in Toronto, and one that one Yahoo executive warned me a few years ago that they never really wanted have that made known.

So with Uverse and FIOS as their new access products, slowly, but surely, the newer technologies will eat away at Yahoo's DSL product, thus Yahoo's role of being the ad provider and content provider will likely be nixed or reduced. Already its known in the ad sales circles of Verizon bolstering and building their own ad sales force to sell against the cable guys, as they view FIOS customers the same way they viewed dial customers and the Yellow Pages. The only difference, is the fingers do the walking over a keyboard, or remote, instead of turning the pages. AT&T will obviously follow suit.

So where does that leave Yahoo? Good question. Nothing that they're saying gives any indication of what their real moves are going to be, and since they're not really talking, they're only hurting their current shareholders value.