Yahoo to give employees any smartphone they like

Marissa Mayer is giving everyone at Yahoo an iPhone 5, reports Nicholas Carlson:

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just sent an email to all of Yahoo's full time and part time employees in the US, promising them a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone.

"People are happy," says a source at the company.

But here's a buried lede:

Yahoo is also going to discontinue IT support for Blackberry phones.

The first momentary, blurting sucking noise from the drain around which RIM circles.

• [Julian Uzielli]

  >The first momentary, blurting sucking noise from the drain around which RIM circles.

  Now that right there is some damn fine prose.

  • [Fred Sobotka]

     Fine, indeed, but it’s hardly the first noise of that type emanating from RIM.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      There’s a rimming joke in there somewhere.

      • [funkyfresh]

         Is it about rimshot or rimjob? Only Xeni has the answer!

• [Chuck]

  Any employee who makes a “Blackberry is still around?” joke will be issued a Blackberry.

• [Marc Mielke]

  Is Yahoo! really doing well enough for this kind of giveaway? 

  • [grimc]

    Yahoo is sitting on huge cash reserves. An article some months back put it in the same league as Apple and Google. And the layoffs reduced the overhead by a fair amount.

    • [kirkk]

      Ummm… as of their last filing Yahoo had 1.9 Billion cash on hand… nothing to sneeze at but nowhere near the 43 Billion Google has or the 100+ Billion that Apple is sitting on.

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    Giveaway? A phone is usually one of those semi-perks. Yahoo probably just wants always-on employees.

    • [bkad]

      That’s my experience. Any company-issued communication device, be it laptop, phone, or pager, caries certain stated or unstated expectations. The “perk” is having a choice, and not being forced into a blackberry or a windows phone (my company’s two choices).

      (Yes, my company still issues and uses pagers, for use in travel destinations that ban cell phones.)

      • [Nathan Hornby]

        Pagers. Awesome.

    • [giantasterisk]

      My former employer would also provide any phone you wanted, but you had to get approval of any app you wanted to add to it, and reserved the right to search & seize at any time. I still don’t understand why almost no one was concerned about the invasion of privacy, nor the 24/7 on-call aspect either. Guess our right to privacy has less value to people these days?

      • [twianto]

        Now I have to admit, I’ve _never_ thought of using my company-issued cell phone for anything private. Isn’t that just common sense?

        • [giantasterisk]

          The folks I worked with used their work-provided phone as their one and only phone and agreed to let the company monitor what apps they used. Guess they didn’t want to pay for a second one.

        • [twianto]

          …and not because I distrust my employers (I wouldn’t work for them if I did) but because work and private are two completely separate things. Same reason why I wouldn’t, ahem, “evaluate” the latest TV series on my work laptop; you just don’t want to mix the two and create potential liability issues.

        • [Halloween_Jack]

           If the company is paying for the plan, depending on your carrier and the specific plan (including data), you could be talking about saving over a thousand dollars a year if you don’t have a phone of your own (or a latest-model smartphone even if you do). That’s not pocket change for a lot of people.

      • [Nathan Hornby]

        Indubitably

• [Simeon]

  Blackberries still seem incredibly popular to me in London, particularly with business types and yoof. Some combination of free messaging and a h/w keyboard probably?

  • [Ladyfingers]

     Blackberry’s encryption is still a lot better than anything else available right now, as far as I understand, so a lot of businesses seem to mandate them for employees.

• [paulj]

  What Yahoo! is doing is a generous version of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. The details vary, but it’s becoming a common practice. A company may initially provide the devices, pay employee’s cell phone bills, or just reimburse a set amount. But the usual motivation is that the employee is responsible for the device and carrier plan so that the corporate IT department doesn’t have do deal with it, resulting in cost savings in the long run.  What sets this apart is that Mayer understands that this is also a way to bring her employees closer to their users.

  • [EH]

    By users, do you mean bosses?

• [Sirkowski]

  …and nothing of value was lost.

• [Grey Eyed Man of Destiny]

  Excuse my nitpicking, but how can a lede be buried?

  • [elix]

    Burying the lede means leaving the really important information until deep in the newspaper story, where people are likely to miss it since readers frequently only skim the first few paragraphs (at most).

    In this case, Rob’s basically stating that he thinks the real story here is another step along RIM’s road to oblivion and irrelevance in the mobile industry, more than Mayer buying every employee an Android, iOS, or Nokia (Windows Phone, theoretically Symbian) phone of their choice.

    • [CH]

      Hmm… but is the “discontinuing IT support for Blackberry” important information in this article? Perhaps that it is not part of the list of phones that the company will pay for, and that Yahoo therefore doesn’t see it as smartphones their users use. But… is that really news to anybody? (Might be… I’m from a country where Blackberry never became more than a footnote, so to me it’s pretty obsolete.)

      • [Itsumishi]

        Blackberry’s core users were the corporates. When you’ve got a company as big as Yahoo deciding not only to ditch using them, but not even support them then it’s a pretty bad news for RIM (and a long time coming).

      • [Halloween_Jack]

         BlackBerry was much more than a footnote in the U.S.; it got a big boost after 9/11, when people in Washington, D.C. could still send messages after the cell phone network was overloaded. Plus, as mentioned above, the relatively high level of security. I work for a fairly large corporation and they’ve just recently dropped BB as a corporate standard.

      • [elix]

        Put in context, this is about as bad as a burn as if Yahoo snubbed Microsoft by declaring that all employees would be migrating to Linux or Mac desktops only. Only RIM is not in a position even remotely close to healthy, while Microsoft is very stable and making some exciting (and controversial) changes to their approach to consumer products (Windows 8, the Metr–ImeanWindows8-style interface being used as a unifying design foundation for all of their major brands with a gradual convergence across device types).

    • [Grey Eyed Man of Destiny]

      Thanks to both of you (elix and Rob). Very interesting, I’d never heard that phrase before. English sure is funny. 

• [LarryD]

  There will be some folks surprised by how much their phone bills go up after this…  I had a blackberry that was grandfathered in on my old plan and was not considered a ‘smart’ phone.  When my company got rid of Blackberry they also bought me a new phone of my choice…  sadly, my bill went up $50 month as a result.  :(

  • [twianto]

    That seems strange; every employer that has ever given me a cell phone paid for it. I never even saw a bill.

    Why would you pay for work-related equipment yourself?

    • [twianto]

      …and that’s exactly what the article says, the company will pay all bills.

      BTW, headline is incorrect. Should be more along the lines of “one of five pre-selected phones” instead of “any smartphone they like,” which is not what they’re doing.

  • [retepslluerb]

    They also pick up the bill.

    It’s in the linked article.

• [Shinkuhadoken]

  Ah, the great technological lead Canada once held in Internet and Telecommunications in the 90s only to let it slip away under the horrible mismanagement of the oligopolistic greed of a few big corporations.

• [The Duck]

  I don’t think the discontinuation of Blackberry support is the “lead,” or even A “lead.”  The device and the company are already toast, just not quite so carbonized yet as Palm and its Treo.

• [Spraynard Kruger]

  “But here’s a berried lede:”

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Isn’t that a Tudor-era dessert?

• [jamesey10]

  I’m glad I don’t own Yahoo stock.

• [randomroyalty]

  Funny how a loser company like Yahoo! continues to make bad decisions about the technology they use themselves.