Yahoo appears to be taking a leaf out of major rival Google’s book, placing emphasis on mobile throughout its entire organisation. MocoNews notes that new CEO Carol Bartz has broken up Yahoo’s mobile group and redeployed those employees across the company’s individual product groups (following the departure of a number of high-profile mobile executives). Cory Pforzheimer, Yahoo’s senior manager of corporate communications, who confirmed the group’s reorganisation, told MocoNews: “We are infusing mobile throughout the organisation, rather than having a specific team for mobile… The importance of mobile in Yahoo has increased and we are re-aligning the organisation to do just that.” He said Yahoo will continue to have small regional teams that will manage the company’s more than 80 carrier partnerships worldwide. But now “mobile is top of mind for everyone, and it’s part of regional teams, business teams, product teams,” he added. 

At last month’s GSMA Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked of his company’s new ‘Mobile First’ strategy, where engineers are encouraged to come up with ideas and projects for the mobile phone before the PC in light of the larger mobile opportunity. Certainly Yahoo needs to do something radical to claw back mobile search market share and industry status from Google. Although Yahoo surprised many last week with news that it will be the default search provider on AT&T’s new Motorola handset, Backflip (which uses Google’s mobile operating system, Android), T-Mobile USA later announced it has replaced Yahoo with Google as its default search engine on mobile phones.