In a move that can only be described as marketable good will, Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, has unveiled her plan to offer all U.S.-based employees one of five phones at no cost. The devices are the iPhone 5, HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S III, Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC EVO 4G LTE. She says that the company is moving away from BlackBerry phones on their enterprise network so that employees can use “devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.” The program is called “Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!”
As the Bring Your Own Device market grows, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for IT administrators to maintain compatibility with disparate devices, especially those under the Android moniker. HTC and Samsung provide excellent enterprise email support and built-in VPN and remote management software; Windows Phone 8 looks to improve on its rather-limited WP7.5 lineage in the enterprise space; and iPhone has, since iOS 4, excellent enterprise support.
Nokia jumped at the marketing opportunity, too, offering any Yahoo employee who chooses its Lumia 920 device a free wireless charging plate.
Obviously this isn’t good news for RIM, which is under pressure to deliver BlackBerry 10 sooner than later. I have no doubt that Mayer would include the new all-touch BB10 device if it was available in the near future — problem is that it will be ready, at the earliest, in January 2013.
The full email is below:
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 920We’re getting started right away and taking orders starting now.
What do you think of this move by the new CEO?
Source: Business Insider
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