Recently-hired Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, has kicked off a new endeavor at Yahoo in which all employees will receive their choice of a free smartphone, including the Nokia Lumia 920. The program called "Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!" is intended to get workers using the same technologies as their customers and was announced to Yahoo employees across 22 countries in a memo, part of which said:
"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."
Yahoo workers will get to choose from the Nokia Lumia 920, iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, and HTC EVO 4G LTE and will cover the corresponding monthly voice and data plans as well. In a blow to RIM, Yahoo has made it part of their IT policy to no longer support Blackberries.
Yahoo is the second big company in the past couple of days to offer employees free smartphones. Microsoft just held a huge company event where they announced that workers would be receiving new PCs, Microsoft Surface tablets and Windows Phone 8 devices.
You can read the internal Yahoo memo in its entirety 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."
Source: Business Insider; Thanks for the tip, Karl!
