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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."
What's next, RIM employees stop using Yahoo for search and tell their employees to use Google or Bing?
Oww, that has to hurt.
Yeah, we all knew that RIM was on the outs; but getting cut from the running for 'stodgy corporate issued device' by the somewhat-less-than-vibrant players over at yahoo? Ice burn, man, Ice Burn.
No one buys Microsoft phones.
They're in the same boat as RIM but they get a pass for some reason.
I can only assume Microsoft is paying them to stay somehow? Maybe free phones?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It's Java again.
Even the designer of C# has moved on, to Javascript of all places!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
CEO Marissa Mayer: "so we can think and work as the majority of our users do".
That makes sense on the surface, but it doesn't exactly sound like the attitude of a company that wants to be an innovator or technology leader. It might not be the attitude of a market leader, either. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy of another big tech firm, "Think Same" may not be the motto to live by. But then I'm CEO of nothing.
I am not a crackpot.
Your ELD is off.
If you could astropost when they'll actually ship, the rest of the world might care.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
I'm glad to see they chose Nokia Lumia 920 as a phone. It is very powerful, sleek and well-done smartphone with enterprise features from Microsoft. It's really much better business phone than iPhone or Android-based smart phones. On top of that Yahoo can use Visual Studio to develop their own apps - all with the maturity and familiarity of C# and Windows programming. Great choice!
Hum. You guys aren't up to the standard of the normal turfers from waggeneredstrom.com. They usually throw in some links:
I'm glad to see they chose Nokia Lumia 920 as a phone. It is very powerful, sleek and well-done smartphone with enterprise features from Microsoft. It's really much better business phone than iPhone or Android-based smart phones. On top of that Yahoo can use Visual Studio to develop their own apps - all with the maturity and familiarity of C# and Windows programming. Great choice!
What's next, RIM employees stop using Yahoo for search and tell their employees to use Google or Bing?
I think the vast majority of them are already using monster.com and dice.com, etc. Oh wait, do you mean general internet searching, not looking for a new job after the downsizing?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We run a small business and I can say that our IT group was quite happy when we moved away from blackberry devices. Not because of the phones themselves but instead because of the server side software. It is very likely things have changed since we stopped using their phones but I can tell you that we would be constantly losing device sync between the server side and the phones and would have to manually resync the connections. If that software is still in use I can see how companies the size of Yahoo would want to not have to support the additional infrastructure that is needed for the blackberry devices.
It's like being dumped by the dorkiest fat kid in school.
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think that moving people from BlackBerry to Windows Phone will solve the problem she's describing.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
C# is completely different than Java. Know what you speak of.
C# developer here, and yes, C# shares a lot of similarities with Java, being as they are both C-family languages. However, I do agree that C# is sufficiently different to make it, on balance, a better and more flexible all-round language than Java.
*waits for anti-MS Java worshippers*
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
I like WinPhone/VS/C#, and I'm still calling shill.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/java_csharp_comparison.html
Weeee, look at how different it is.
It's so different.
It's clearly thinking different.
It's sooooooo different.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
C# was designed to be a Java replacement and shared nearly identical syntax as well as utilizing the intermediate language VM and garbage collection. Although MS have added numerous language features over the years, it is absolutely not "completely different than Java."
Ditto. I have the HTC Arrive and still tell people that I love WP7 (of course, I'm mad at Sprint for their lack of support for WP7 --- I just hope it corrects with WP8) and I code in C# all day long. But that post was a tad "blech" to me as well.
But I was glad to see that WP8 made Yahoo's cut of "still relevant" phones.
When you focus on just those items, sure. But that table didn't include all of the features of both languages. Where's LINQ? Lamda expressions? etc.?
Run that same table to compare against any other language derived from C/C++.......there will be similar overlap. The point of that table looked like it was to get someone started on making the move from one language to the other.
As a C# guy, I find VB syntax to be a major inefficiency when I'm using it. That's not because VB is necessarily any less efficient, it's just that I'm thinking in C# and translating on the fly. So there are some valid personal reasons to dislike VB. I'm sure the exact opposite is true for you.
Then there's unsafe. That's the last thing VB still lacks that C# can do. It allows for all of the COM interop (ugh) to work. Without unsafe, there's no interop, or interop has to be coded directly in MSIL. Count your blessings on never having to work with unsafe code in a managed environment. If C is a gun that lets you shoot yourself in the foot, and C++ is a shotgun that will remove your leg with it, then C# with unsafe is a grenade with the pin pulled and you're wearing handcuffs.
On the other hand, VB has With and C# doesn't. But that's just a typing shortcut.
As for the background compiler, that hasn't been an issue, pretty much ever. Things that are compile-time checked will show up on a rebuild. Personally, I find VB's incessant bitching about errors caused by an incomplete line of code to be worse than C#'s lack of instant compilation checking.
that's so 90s.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
No one worships Java. It's owned by Oracle, and the the only tech company to get more hate than M$ is Oracle.
That's not true. Oracle is #3 on my list, just below Apple.
With a comparison like that, I guess there would no differences between C, C++, JavaScript, Objective C.
A few differences copied from a Stackoverflow post:
Generics are completely different between the two; Java generics are just a compile-time "trick" (but a useful one at that). In C# and .NET generics are maintained at execution time too, and work for value types as well as reference types, keeping the appropriate efficiency (e.g. a List as a byte[] backing it, rather than an array of boxed bytes.) .NET in general) than Java's JNI .NET is a more transparent affair, with a reference type being created for boxing by the CLR for any value type.
C# doesn't have checked exceptions
Java doesn't allow the creation of user-defined value types
Java doesn't have operator and conversion overloading
Java doesn't have iterator blocks for simple implemetation of iterators
Java doesn't have anything like LINQ
Partly due to not having delegates, Java doesn't have anything quite like anonymous methods and lambda expressions. Anonymous inner classes usually fill these roles, but clunkily.
Java doesn't have expression trees
C# doesn't have anonymous inner classes
C# doesn't have Java's inner classes at all, in fact - all nested classes in C# are like Java's static nested classes
Java doesn't have static classes (which don't have any instance constructors, and can't be used for variables, parameters etc)
Java doesn't have any equivalent to the C# 3.0 anonymous types
Java doesn't have implicitly typed local variables
Java doesn't have extension methods
Java doesn't have object and collection initializer expressions
The access modifiers are somewhat different - in Java there's (currently) no direct equivalent of an assembly, so no idea of "internal" visibility; in C# there's no equivalent to the "default" visibility in Java which takes account of namespace (and inheritance)
The order of initialization in Java and C# is subtly different (C# executes variable initializers before the chained call to the base type's constructor)
Java doesn't have an equivalent of the using statement for simplified try/finally handling of resources
Java doesn't have properties as part of the language; they're a convention of get/set/is methods
Java doesn't have the equivalent of "unsafe" code
Interop is easier in C# (and
Java and C# have somewhat different ideas of enums. Java's are much more object-oriented.
Java has no preprocessor directives (#define, #if etc in C#).
Java has no equivalent of C#'s ref and out for passing parameters by reference
Java has no equivalent of partial types
C# interfaces cannot declare fields
Java has no unsigned integer types
Java has no language support for a decimal type. (java.math.BigDecimal provides something like System.Decimal - with differences - but there's no language support)
Java has no equivalent of nullable value types
Boxing in Java uses predefined (but "normal") reference types with particular operations on them. Boxing in C# and
This is not exhaustive, but it covers everything I can think of off-hand.
I wish I worked at a tech company that would do something like that for it's employees, although granted it is a work phone though... *shrugs*
I think RIM seriously needs to rethink their strategy when it comes to users and business which to them have been one and the same. Except while their infrastructure might have been the "bees knees" 5-10 years ago, it's old and unreliable to most of what people use today. for instance my parents used blackberries (despite my constant objections) up until their last phone upgrade a little less than 1 year ago. The Blackberry storms or storm 2's or something like that I think they had. Always having problems, screen popping out of the device (well that's a unit defect, but it happened more than once, even on replacements). Emails and texts not appearing for hours or even a day+ later, despite having a perfect signal. That was I believe due to RIMS network and not the carriers. Rim kinda does their own thing with your emails and texts and then sends them over to your carrier who sends them to your phone.. or that's how I thought it was.
That isn't much different from Google in a way, except Google actually works, and works very very well. If someone sends me a text or email and I have a usable data signal (doesn't need to be a perfect signal 3g or 4g) it will show up almost instantly on my phone or tablet or whatever I'm using. Rim.. I could text my parents and not get a response the entire day, go home and be like WTF didn't you respond and DING... there is my 12 hour old message finally arriving in their inbox, NOT COOL. and not a one off thing, this was a fairly common occurrence.
Then if you needed to fix anything on those damned things, good luck. They had clunky awful interfaces and ui's (especially compared to android phones and even the Iphones we have now. Trying to find the setting for some trivial little thing ended up turning into a test of patience and deciding whether or not to throw it through a wall. Everytime I have to touch one and see that god awful clickable screen... not like most new phones where you tap it to click.. i mean the screen was a damn button literally.. I cringe. Add to that it's closed source and who knows what Rim does on their network with your data or information you send through it's network and the fact that it can't run the majority of things out there, unless you love the $$$ verizon apps you could buy (unless rim has some new app market? anything better than what we already have with Google or apple or any 3rd party app stores, like on android? )?
I think this is something the company is doing right and I think a lot more companies need to take note and dump rim as well. RIM really needs to come out with something new and exciting instead of using the same old same old it always has.
Poe's law may also apply here.
Fuck Beta
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."
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It's remarkable how on every phone story there's a post made simultaneously with the article about how great the Lumia is.
Microsoft really needs to hire less obvious shills.
Six first posts from six most recent phone stories. Based on stats, 0 were hidden. The first 'shilly' looking one (the last one on the list) does not mention Lumia and may be a troll or a fanboy. I think same applies here. If only for the reason that I don't see why someone would pay for posting crap that gets modded to oblivion. Much more efficient would be for example get a ton of articles about your phone published. Then again, I guess if Apple is what Slashdotters want to read about, Apple articles we get.
Anyway, do you want to qualify that 'every phone story' or are you just bashing?
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3123189&cid=41361797
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3121629&cid=41360879
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3121469&cid=41356895
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3120581&cid=41350393
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3118973&cid=41345035
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3119907&cid=41345619
Actually. I double checked. And Lumia is mentioned at all only in comments of ONE of those articles. And that was going for funny with grip gloves
At the moment 3 out of 4 of your most recent comments bash Microsoft, Lumia, WP. So I guess I'll just conclude that you must be the one with an agenda. I guess thre's just no relying on UID. And before you ask, I own a Symbian phone and did not even consider buying WP 7.5 one. WP8 I am considering. Would buy a Meego phone if new ones were released.
It is what it is.
Clueful IT departments will still favor blackberry as it still is far more manageable and secure than the other options. The only real issue is that your coworkers will probably hate you.