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Jerry Yang has made Yahoo Go 3.0, Yahoo's mobile application platform, a key piece of the strategy to keep his business relevant. Rather than trying to run everything, like Google or Apple, Yahoo will focus on being a friend to all. MySpace, eBay, and MTV. But Yang is once again focused on the wrong partners.

Yang's friends are in low places — positions of weakness relative to the wireless carriers who exercise control over the services used on their phones. While Yahoo has signed up some phone manufacturers to carry Go, the carriers who buy their phones have final say over what runs — and they have deleted Go before it gets into users' hands. Consigned to obscurity as an add-on download, Yahoo Go is just another example of Yahoo's strategic blundering.