UPDATED: Pal Jeff Bonforte got to me today to help set the record straight. Yahoo wants to and is able to Interop with all the 1.0 phone companies and the 2.6 billion devices they ring each day. Yahoo has no plans to shut down the Voice efforts. Jeff says Yahoo is heading towards what he calls the Voice 3.0 business. RightYahoo is number two in the VoIP calling space, behind Skype and far ahead of everyone else in the the blended 1.0 + 2.0 space, he said.
Needless to say, the 1950’s style hunt is on at Yahoo for the internal leak!
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A rumor floating around has Yahoo going a bit lighter on the spreading of peanut butter as the report is there will be a reduction in, if not a wiping out, of the Yahoo Voice Communications team. Ironically that group falls under the overall aegis of the Manifesto Master, Brad Garlinghouse.
While I’ve not yet confirmed THE RUMOR, the reports are also that the reason for the “reduction” is tied to Yahoo’s long standing relationship with SBC (Now AT&T) and a steady desire to not see their business erode.
If all goes as planned AT&T will also launch a soft client with IM to pick up the slack. Then again, this could all be just a late April Fool’s joke, but on the heels of the Peanut Butter Manifesto, this seems to be the kind of news that likely would be spread before the jar has gone stale. AT&T has never been happy with Yahoo launching Messenger with Voice and this seems to be a kow-tow for more grander things to come between the two.
Maybe this explains why we still haven’t seen a Mac client release with voice for Messenger that was due last Spring and it’s now almost Winter….
Needless to say I have a call into some folks at Yahoo!
I checked out the Yahoo Auctions for “corporate soul for sale”, but I think the auction much have finished too long ago to show up.
If true, how can Yahoo sustain communities against richer more real-time voice-enabled competition? This will ultimately erode their core business.
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/11/industry-note-why-yahoo-is-new-aol-or.cfm
If there’s one lesson from YouTube and MySpace, it’s that the world can change really fast. Becoming an ally of the telcos will be Yahoo’s undoing, as others come to do aggregation, community and content better within each silo, and Yahoo needs to consider it’s alliance partners before every action and reaction.