Stowe Boyd at /Message posts on the new Yahoo Messenger 3.0 beta 2 for the Mac. His lament. Still no voice.
Basically its time for my friends at Yahoo, Skippy and the Rock Star, otherwise known as Messrs. Garlinghouse and Bonforte to stop thinking the bloggers are a silent minion like the Siamese public in the King and I. I mean, it has been two years since Yahoo bought Dialpad for a princely sum as part of their effort to catch up with the Skypes. That was Garlinghouse's doing. Shortly afterwards he realigned the product side, wooing away Gizmo Project developer Jeff Bonforte to build him a voice business.
But other than a big launch on the Windows XP platform in 2005 there has been no real effort by anyone to move in big way publicly with Voice at Yahoo. And when you look at Stowe's post you can see that there really hasn't been any forward progress on integrating voice across the Yahoo platform or even making it Cross OS platform. Garlinghouse has become a writer of manifestos and Bonforte has been moved up as well, serving now as VP and point on all Social Media at Yahoo. A few month back Bonforte gave me a demo of Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista. That too was missing Voice, and was something I called him on. Looking back, it was the harbinger of things to come. Yahoo Messenger for Mac Beta 2 seems to prove that vision is reality.
So just like at AOL where AIM PhoneLine has pretty much become a goner, and at Microsoft where IM based voice has never been a big emphasis beyond what is laid in with X-Box Live, it appears the only one of the portals with a direction is Google. What's more this silencing of talk at Yahoo also clearly validates the decision of clients Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet to exit from Yahoo when they did to start GrandCentral and then get bought by Google.
So to my friends Brad and Jeff--My hats off to you as I guess you finally figured out that talk really is cheap. So either s*#t or get off the pot and do what you said you would or just admit that "Yahoo isn't talking."
Perhaps it's not a lack of will or knowledge but rather a political issue. Yahoo may have promised to its telco and cable co partners (e.g. SBC or Rogers here in Canada) that it would not offer competitive voice service.
Posted by: Shai Berger | September 10, 2007 at 08:01 AM