At an international media lunch briefing, Yahoo Mail (left) and Instant Messenger (right) execs confirmed the company exclusive focus on the consumer market, not the enterprise. A few years ago, Yahoo launched an enterprise version of it's Instant Messenger service to eventually scrap it, and today, unlike Google with Apps for your Domain, Yahoo does not have a Mail version for the SMB/enterprise/school market.

We are focused on a consumer marketplace right now with this product [Yahoo Mail Beta]. We go after the 500 million Webmail users and try to grow that to a billion, said John Kremer, VP of Yahoo! Mail

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's senior director of real time communication added,

One thing that we learned with the enterprise business is that Yahoo does very well with consumers. It turns out we have a huge enterprise business. We simply don't need to have an enterprise product

My favourite example is the guys at Cisco. They have a real-time communications guy and they have their own stuff and yet they use Yahoo Messenger as the defacto communication internally. And when you trade shares on Wall Street, Messenger is the defacto stock trading application

We become an enterprise application. And as a matter of fact, there's millions of dollars of software sold to enterprises to manage services like Yahoo Mail and Messenger on their network