Yahoo! announced tonight that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google’s Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on.
PaidContent’s MocoNews points out that though Go “comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, carriers in the United States strip the software from the phones.”
In as much as handset manufacturers are open to platform-type innovation, and software vendors are obviously moving in this direction – it seems obvious that the foot-draggers are the telcom carriers. Their stranglehold over the mobile world seems in direct conflict with efforts to make the most of the mobile user experience – but telcoms are used to being the among the most hated companies on the planet.
To draw an analogy with major record labels and DRM – this is almost the opposite type of situation. The case for mobile openness seems to remain based in hopefulness more than a survival imperative for vendors faced with a market threat.
To draw another analogy – might this be comparable to Comcast telling Mozilla that it can’t start Comcast customers who are Firefox users out on Google’s search page, that it has to make a Comcast search page the default home page?
While telcom execs will likely get theirs in the afterlife, the rest of us will probably have to keep on wishing – unless 3rd party software becomes the only meaningful means of monetization and major revenue sharing comes about.
