[From ]Alejandro Sanz Everyone knows by now that Microsoft dropped its bid for Yahoo! That makes life both easier and more complicated for the "Redmond giant," as journalists like to say. Integrating Yahoo! would have been a challenge but also given the company a range of consumer products and platforms that would have boosted its position online and in mobile.
To focus on mobile exclusively, Microsoft right now has the Windows Mobile OS and mobile IE; it also owns Tellme and 1-800-Call-411 (the Tellme-powered free directory assistance service). Then there's Live Search for mobile (both an application and a WAP tool). There are a lot of properties here but none of them yet has mainstream consumer visibility and there's no single, compelling brand like Google has at the moment.
Now feeling richer the company would do well to make some acquisitions in the mobile space. One company it might look at acquiring quickly is Skyfire. I had a chance to use the browser extensively over the weekend and it is generally quite a bit better than the experience currently offered by mobile IE.
In some ways the "pan and zoom" experience is inferior to WAP. Sites formatted for a WAP browser are sometimes easier to read. But overall it's preferable from a consumer perspective to have access to the "real Internet" on one's mobile device (smartphone). If such browsers gain widespread adoption it does, however, represent a particular problem for online display advertisers.
In addition, full Internet browsers on the mobile phone will change user behavior over time, making it much more like conventional Internet usage. Indeed, there are lots of implications to these browsers (Safari, Mozilla, Opera, Skyfire) and their adoption. They probably won't kill WAP in the near term or client applications but they may eventually become the standard for smartphones. (Good client apps and full HTML browsers can co-exist as they do currently on the iPhone.)
So if I were Microsoft, I'd swoop down and pick up Skyfire sooner rather than later.
