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:Oh Yahoo...

[rgbrenner]

That's one way of interpreting it.

So here's an ex-google exec saying Yahoo employees can use a bunch of android phones or a currently-unavailable iphone. Didn't a certain Nokia exec do something similar recently.. hmm

So Yahoo thinks it should discard RIM... When was the last time Yahoo got much of anything right? How do we know this isn't yet another miss-step? Aren't there some BB users that use Yahoo? Wouldn't it be better if Yahoo employees used ALL of the common smartphones?

Re:Nokia Lumia 920

[CastrTroy]

You think that's bad, I'm a VB.Net developer. People rant endlessly about VB.Net. It's almost got the exact same feature set as C#, minus a few and plus a few features. For a long time, C# was missing simple things like optional parameters. Also, VB.Net has always had a much superior background compiler. A lot of what you hear about VB.Net is based on biases from the old VB, as well as complaints about syntax and verbosity. Neither of which really address it's merits.