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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."
This sounds like a ploy to retain employees by tempting them with shiny objects.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
No one buys Microsoft phones.
Not true. This is posted from a Windows 7 Phone. They work just fine. I'm happy with mine. You don't know what you're talking about.
I don't respond to AC's.
choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5
None of these phones have real keyboards. To those of us with large fingers, that's a deal-breaker when selecting a phone; on-screen keyboards are simply unusable with a screen that small. As much as it sucks in other ways, the BlackBerry at least did offer a hardware keyboard. Yahoo should offer at least one Android phone with an actual keyboard (maybe the Samsung Epic 4G?)
Companies that both manufacture hardware and hand-roll their operating systems tend to collapse over time.
There are too many decisions which must be made centrally, and these involve too many conflicting "business objectives." In other words, the two branches (hardware and OS) can't figure out how to work together to nudge consumers toward spending more money, time and effort on the product.
Apple ducked this one by purchasing the core of its operating system from two sources, and allowing maintenance to be mostly driven by updates at least one of those OSes (BSD).
Blackberry has been frozen in motion (like Yahoo), unable to develop new software or hardware at the pace of the market. The result is that the world has moved on and, by parallax motion, RIM has moved backward.