ON YAHOO! vs. GOOGLE ON MOBILES

FOLLOW THE USERS

While Google continues to win against Yahoo! on search market share and pleasing Wall Street, Yahoo! may have an edge currently on getting the mobile version of it's services on millions of Motorola and Nokia phones.

As this Reuters story by Eric Auchard notes:

"Yahoo Inc., the world's largest Internet media company, and Motorola Inc., the second-biggest maker of mobile phones, said late on Wednesday that Motorola will embed Yahoo services on tens of millions of phones.

The new multi-year deal calls for new mid-priced and high-end Motorola phones to run an integrated set of services known as Yahoo Go for Mobile (http://go.yahoo.com/mobile ) that includes Yahoo e-mail, search and address book in a single place.)

This follows a Yahoo! mobile deal with Nokia earlier this year:

"In January, Yahoo announced a deal with Finland's

Nokia (NOK1V.HE), the world's largest mobile handset maker, to begin installing Yahoo Go on millions of Nokia phones worldwide."

Google's playing catch-up here, as the Reuters story explains:

"Yahoo rival Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) is racing to win similar positioning for its Web services through deals with handset makers and mobile carriers."

While the money isn't quite there on the mobile front, the battle is in getting mainstream users of these services to get used to accessing the same services on the mobiles. 

And that'll take concerted time and effort on the part of all concerned. 

And then of course, there's question of Microsoft, which already has the mobile version of it's operating systems on an increasing number of PDAs, is also focused on mobiles.  Can an effort to get MSN services on cell phones be far behind?

Finally to consider, is the role of the carriers.  They too have an opinion on what services eventually make the decks (user interface screens) of their cell phones, with a focus on preserving what they can of their walled garden of services.

It's all an interesting scuffle, with increasing large stakes worldwide. 

And for now, Yahoo! seems to have it's eye firmly on the prize.