Yahoo Excludes BlackBerry From Employee Smartphone List

Nerval's Lobster writes "Freshly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is promising the company's U.S. employees a new smartphone of their choice. There's just one catch: it can't be a BlackBerry. According to Business Insider, which posted significant portions of Mayer's memo, employees will have a choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5. 'We'd like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do,' she wrote, adding that Yahoo will shift away from BlackBerry as its corporate device of choice. Somewhere up in Waterloo, at least one Research In Motion executive could be screaming in frustration over this development. Not because Yahoo is a bellwether for corporate smartphone use; its U.S. employees shifting to an iOS, Windows Phone or Android device won't automatically drive other major companies will follow suit. But as a symbol of RIM's current issues, it's difficult to find a better one than a high-profile technology company dumping its collective BlackBerry stock in favor of pretty much any other platform."

Comments

Re:Nokia Lumia 920

[cbhacking]

Oh, let's see.

Proper anonymous functions, including lambdas.
Proper function pointers (called delegates) without needing to write entire classes for them.
Support for stack-allocated complex types (structs).
Support for bi-directional and output parameters, even of types normally passed by value.
Unsigned integer types.
Object parameters (technically functions, but cleaner than a bunch of Get*and Set* function definitions and usages).
Proper generics (try declaring an array of generic type in Java, for example).
Easy interop with native code (P/Invoke, good marshaling capabilities, support for ordered structs and unsigned types, etc.).
Support for direct memory access (if you want/need it; use the unsafe keyword and byte* or similar types).
LINQ.
Tuples.
No one-public-class-per-source-file restriction, or the associated restriction on file name.
No restriction on project directory structure.
Partial classes (allows separating parts of the same class, such as autogenerated code from developer code, into different files).
The using keyword (in both of its uses).
Conditional compilation (similar to C preprocessor) to do things like exclude debug code without any overhead at all.

These are the ones that came to mind in just a few minutes of thinking about it, based on personal experiences, I'm sure there's a ton more. C# is a vastly more advanced language than Java. I don't deny that MS learned heavily from Java, but half of that learning was "let's not repeat their mistakes" and the other half was "what is it really lame that this language lacks? Let's do better."