Earlier this week, I saw a demo by Yahoo Communication Products team leads Brad Garlinghouse and Jeff Bonforte of new phone services that are integrated into Yahoo Messenger–but the meeting was embargoed-that is, till Newsweek broke the embargo (and scooped the bloggers).
The core of the new product announcement was the news that a dialpad has been added to Mesenger, turning it into a phone service able to make domestic or international calls to regular telephones. at a price of 1 cent a minute–but the bells and whistles include the ability for anyone anywhere to purchase a phone number with which to receive calls, free voice mail, news ways to store phone numbers and chose contract methods working off a buddy list, and the hope of integrating the phone capabilities into all sorts of Yahoo verticals.
What impressed me the most about this product announcement–aside from Yahoo’s obvious determination to launch a global product to go after Skype–was the opportunities it offered for integration into Yahoo premium services like Personals and Fantasy Baseball as either product upgrades or new revenue streams. To put it in other words, one of the ways Yahoo can compete with Google, IMHO, isn’t to try to match then in product sets and feature to feature upgrades but to figure out what they can do differently–and do it amazingly well–and integration of tools across media and life management platforms seems like one smart way to go in this regard.
Earlier this week, I saw a demo by Yahoo Communication Products team leads Brad Garlinghouse and Jeff Bonforte of new phone services that are integrated into Yahoo Messenger–but the meeting was embargoed-that is, till Newsweek broke the embargo (and scooped the bloggers).
The core of the new product announcement was the news that a dialpad has been added to Mesenger, turning it into a phone service able to make domestic or international calls to regular telephones. at a price of 1 cent a minute–but the bells and whistles include the ability for anyone anywhere to purchase a phone number with which to receive calls, free voice mail, news ways to store phone numbers and chose contract methods working off a buddy list, and the hope of integrating the phone capabilities into all sorts of Yahoo verticals.
What impressed me the most about this product announcement–aside from Yahoo’s obvious determination to launch a global product to go after Skype–was the opportunities it offered for integration into Yahoo premium services like Personals and Fantasy Baseball as either product upgrades or new revenue streams. To put it in other words, one of the ways Yahoo can compete with Google, IMHO, isn’t to try to match then in product sets and feature to feature upgrades but to figure out what they can do differently–and do it amazingly well–and integration of tools across media and life management platforms seems like one smart way to go in this regard.