This is really some crazy ish, I mean I am not a fan of Yahoo's new CEO I think her leadership skills can be called into question but for her to try to discredit another company is just not good business. You never know when the corporate head you cut comes back around and slap you in the face... sorry if this was brought up before I scanned but didnt see it..
Yahoo CEO: Have a smartphone on us, but no BlackBerrys
Summary: Yahoo has said it will buy its employees any smartphone they want, but snubbed the ill-fated BlackBerry, which CEO Marissa Mayer hinted in an email that it was no longer a "smartphone."
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has emailed her 12,000 employees offering to buy each and every worker a free smartphone, but there's one catch: it can't be a BlackBerry.
In a memo obtained by Business Insider, the note debuts the "Smart Phones, Smart Fun!" initiative at the former Web giant that will cost the firm likely millions of dollars, but will benefit end Yahoo users by putting the most common devices in the hands of employees to test products with; a process commonly known as "dog-fooding."
"Ideally, 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," Mayer writes in the memo.
The phones on offer include an Apple iPhone 5; a bevy of Android phones: Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, and the HTC EVO 4G LTE; and the Nokia Lumia 920.
The snub for the Canada-based Research in Motion comes in the second line, where Mayer says: "Yahoo is moving off of Blackberries [sic] as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries," hinting that the BlackBerry maker's phones are no longer considered "smartphone" compared to its rivals.
Yahoo's move to leave BlackBerrys off the list will likey not please RIM executives or raise morale at RIM headquarters. Crucially, the 'smartphones' were left off the list because their market penetration remains dangerously low compared to rivals, such as Apple, Samsung, and even ailing phone company Nokia, and the firm wants its employees to use the same phones as its customers.
RIM currently has around 80 million users around the world and only a fraction of that on enterprise contracts that churn over the most reliable and stable source of revenue for the company. The BlackBerry maker will offer new BlackBerry 10 devices in the first-quarter 2013, but analysts have warned that the company may not last out that long as it burns through its cash reserves.
We've reached out to Yahoo for comment, but didn't hear back outside U.S. business hours.
