Yahoo! Makes a Smart Move, For Once.

Posted by Jeff Scott on May 18th, 2009

Speaking as a former Yahoo! employee, I've watched them make stupid move after stupid move the past few years. Their biggest, of course, was laying me off last year :). For a struggling company it was odd to see them put so much money and time into projects that the everyone watching them just knew would go no where.

So it was with great relief today to see that Yahoo! made, what I think is a smart move today. They are reducing the scope of their mobile applications development to just the iPhone. They will no longer develop applications for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Java devices. Instead moving all of those devices and any other than the iPhone to their mobile web.

Yahoo! is going from having to support 300+ devices and dozens of different networks (each with different requirements and licensing fees) to just 1 device without the need to worry about the networks and their extended approval times of up to 6 months or more. This, hopefully, will save them a lot of money.

Yahoo currently has 4 applications released for the iPhone. For the list, check after the jump.