Yahoo Messenger starts barking at telecoms
Some days ago when the rumors of a video chat enabled Yahoo messenger escaped the web, it seemed that Yahoo was going to compete with Fring, Qik and others offering video over IP, in Market and AppStore.
Well, one of Yahoo’s main assets (or what’s left of it) is a still very large base of users. In some countries, like Romania, there’s a 90% Yahoo penetration over Hotmail, Gmail and other public mail & messenger services.
This is huge. Yahoo will not compete with Fring, they are going to compete directly with mobile operators for voice customers.
Why would you think the customers belong only to the hardware and mobile OS manufacturer and not also to a service provider? After all, Facebook is building its own phones just to have its own customers, isn’t it?
