In their continuing bid to remain relevant, Yahoo! is apparently going to replace the corporate phones of all their employees. The old mainstays, BlackBerry devices, will be replaced by their much cooler cousins — like the iPhone 5 and Nokia Lumia 920. Sure, this might come off as another stab at RIM, but really it’s just Yahoo! attempting to get with the times.
The problem at hand is it’s bad business to force Yahoo! employees to utilize phones that their customers aren’t likely to be using. It’s far better for them to have a grasp on the freshest technology in order to understand exactly what folks might want from the Internet giant. At least, that’s the given impetus for the switch.
All of this comes courtesy of a supposed internal memo that outlines the plan. Marissa Mayer, the relatively new Yahoo! CEO, has continued to shake things up from the top to the bottom in her attempts to steer the company in a new direction. Ditching BlackBerry only makes sense, though RIM might disagree.
The memo, as published by Business Insider, reads as follows:
We have a very exciting update to share with you today – we are announcing Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun! As of today, Yahoo is moving off of blackberries as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries. A few weeks ago, we said that we would look into smartphone penetration rates globally and take those rates into account when deciding on corporate phones. 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.
Moving forward, we’ll offer you a choice of devices as well as provide monthly plans for the data and phone.
The smartphone choices that we are including in the program are:
* Apple iPhone 5
* Android:
– Samsung Galaxy S3
– HTC One X
– HTC EVO 4G LTE
* Windows Phone 8:
– Nokia Lumia 920
We’re getting started right away and taking orders starting now
(via Business Insider, image via langleyo)
- Yahoo! even started offering free lunch
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- Yahoo! is not impenetrable, this much is known
Published: Sep 17, 2012 08:35 am