Yahoo has moved to consolidate all its enterprise-facing services into their consumer counterparts, and in particular, the instant messaging services that Yahoo has been marketing to enteprrise clients will be managed in a single organization that includes the consumer IM service.

Recent articles on this reorganization, such as Hu's C/NET article, are spinning this as a sweeping reorganization, and that the management that has been pushing for enterprise IM at Yahoo have been pushed aside. The reality is somewhat diffeent. Steve Boom and Ken Hickman, to name just two managers at Yahoo, are still very much in the mix for enterprise IM and related activities at Yahoo.

Like the flurry of news from AOL -- rethinking its direct attack on the enterprise IM market, and partnering with Reuters -- Yahoo's got to take a new tack on the enteprise IM market. However, there is a real market opportunity for the public IM networks, although I think that value proposition has not been perfectly articulated, and the vendors may have to reconfigure their offerings and channels to take that messsage to market.

At the same time, the tone of this wave of news stories is drawing attention to the wrong part of the story. The companies are regrouping to better attack the market, a market exploding in size and complexity. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and dozens of smaller enterprise IM vendors are lining up for a long and serious battle for the enterprise IM market. Yahoo has to play to its strengths, and the power of the public network it has built will be a key element of any winning strategy that Yahoo rolls out.