For a lot of time, employees at Yahoo didn’t consider themselves to be too lucky, but Marissa Mayer changed that. All Yahoo employees got smartphones of their choice from the CEO but the list fended off RIM’s Blackberry.
It looks like new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is trying hard to get employees by her side. It’s obvious she’s trying to make them feel proud and lucky Yahoo is their employer. Marissa Mayer has emailed her 12,000 employees telling them each Yahoo employee can get a smartphone of their choice, all taxes being supported by the company. The email was named simply “Smart Phones, Smart Fun!”
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, but no BlackBerry.
According to Mayer, they want all employees at Yahoo to have smartphones as close as they can to their users so they can understand their needs and develop more efficient products. Unfortunately for the ones at RIM, in Yahoo CEO’s vision, BlackBerry isn’t a smartphone users would normally choose and it’s quite out of date.
On the other hand if Mrs. Mayer would have considered buying RIM’s phones for her employees, it would have made for a great change in BlackBerry’s morale. The company has been losing a lot of clients in favor of Apple and Samsung and sales have plummeted to a new low.
Naturally, Mayer expects that most of her employees will put their faith on iOS and Android devices. But, by choosing Nokia Lumia with Windows 8 (which hasn’t even reached the market yet) she declares (in a silent way) BlackBerry obsolete and dead.
“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” reads Mayer’s email. “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” she added.
She also named the phones that the employees could choose and they’re quite hot. “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.
