If you were RIM, how would you feel if you just heard news of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announce via an email that the entire crew of Yahoo’s full time and part time employees living Stateside will be on the receiving end of a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone? Wait a minute here, don’t you think that the list is missing one of the heavy hitters, says, to the tune of BlackBerry? Yes, that is right, Marissa Mayer wants to kickstart this program that they have called “Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!” The choice of phones include the newly launched iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, or Nokia Lumia 920, in addition to paying for their data and phone bills.
On a side note, Yahoo will be discontinuing IT support for BlackBerry phone, making us wonder when big corporations start to shun BlackBerry, it is hard to see a silver lining in this particular dark cloud. The point behind this exercise is for Yahoo employees to use similar handsets that Yahoo users are using so that they will be able to step into their proverbial shoes while designing better apps. If you were a Yahoo employee, which handset will you choose? I would presume that there will be a balanced ratio and limited availability of each kind of smartphone, so that there won’t be too many Yahoo employees skewed towards a particular handset.