iPhone, Yahoo! and Microsoft

For the past week, most of what I've been posting about is Yahoo! and the potential of being bought out by a variety of companies; Microsoft wants them for search, but a merger with Yahoo! would also put some 90% of email under Microsoft's thumb. Google purportedly made a deal with Yahoo regarding some advertising if Yahoo didn't accept Microsoft's offer, and both AOL and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are supposedly also making offerings to Yahoo. Search is big business, and the chance to get the #2 player seems to have attracted media companies.

One company that I noticed that curiously hasn't been mentioned at all is Apple. And why should Apple be mentioned at all? They have businesses that don't really intersect; Apple has their own .mac service that is likely soon to be outsourced to Google, and they have no interest in running their own portal site. However, Yahoo! provides two service applications on every iPod touch and iPhone shipped -- Weather and Stocks.

This, of course is something of a curiosity for me, as Google also has a capability of sending up to date stocks and weather information, and it puzzles me that with the iPhone having Google Maps and YouTube support, that they didn't contract out the widgets for the Weather and Stocks as well. Perhaps it was part of the deal to get that Yahoo! mail icon on the top of the Mail settings (interestingly, the iPhone doesn't have a default setup for MSN/Hotmail e-mail settings).

If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, any Yahoo! icon on an iPhone app might someday become a MSN icon. Microsoft, having their own mobile division, hasn't done anything about the iPhone, but as part of Microsoft's standard operating procedure, the re-branding of an acquisition is something that happens quite commonly (such as Hotmail becoming Windows Live Hotmail).

Yahoo!, on the other hand, doesn't try to re-brand the acquired properties.

As far as I know, Microsoft hasn't approached Apple about putting anything on the iPhone; even now, Exchange/Outlook integration via IMAP with the iPhone is something of a fustercluck, and Hotmail implementation requires Hotmail users to upgrade to the POP3 enabled Hotmail Plus plan, in which the oldest messages are downloaded first. The solution for both of these is to use Safari to access the webclients of these programs. Consider for a moment, if Microsoft folded Yahoo! Mail into Hotmail, and the amount of breakage that would occur on the iPhone. Microsoft has their own Mobile division, and their own Mobile OS that has seen some amount of adoption in smartphones, but Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has made it pretty clear of what he thinks of the iPhone, but as the iPhone gains a foothold in the cellphone marketplace, it'll be interesting to see the market develop; one year after the announcement of the iPhone, the trend for cellphone manufacturers is definitely touch, with everyone developing their version of the iPhone-style touch interface.