Yahoo Excludes BlackBerry From Employee Smartphone List 192
Nerval's Lobster writes "Freshly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is promising the company's U.S. employees a new smartphone of their choice. There's just one catch: it can't be a BlackBerry. According to Business Insider, which posted significant portions of Mayer's memo, employees will have a choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5. '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 wrote, adding that Yahoo will shift away from BlackBerry as its corporate device of choice. Somewhere up in Waterloo, at least one Research In Motion executive could be screaming in frustration over this development. Not because Yahoo is a bellwether for corporate smartphone use; its U.S. employees shifting to an iOS, Windows Phone or Android device won't automatically drive other major companies will follow suit. But as a symbol of RIM's current issues, it's difficult to find a better one than a high-profile technology company dumping its collective BlackBerry stock in favor of pretty much any other platform."
Re:Nokia Lumia 920 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's Java again.
Even the designer of C# has moved on, to Javascript of all places!
Interesting rationale (Score:5, Interesting)
CEO Marissa Mayer: "so we can think and work as the majority of our users do".
That makes sense on the surface, but it doesn't exactly sound like the attitude of a company that wants to be an innovator or technology leader. It might not be the attitude of a market leader, either. [google.com] At the risk of sounding like a fanboy of another big tech firm, "Think Same" may not be the motto to live by. But then I'm CEO of nothing.
Server side software (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh Yahoo... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's one way of interpreting it.
So here's an ex-google exec saying Yahoo employees can use a bunch of android phones or a currently-unavailable iphone. Didn't a certain Nokia exec do something similar recently.. hmm
So Yahoo thinks it should discard RIM... When was the last time Yahoo got much of anything right? How do we know this isn't yet another miss-step? Aren't there some BB users that use Yahoo? Wouldn't it be better if Yahoo employees used ALL of the common smartphones?
Re:Nokia Lumia 920 (Score:5, Interesting)
C# is completely different than Java. Know what you speak of.
C# developer here, and yes, C# shares a lot of similarities with Java, being as they are both C-family languages. However, I do agree that C# is sufficiently different to make it, on balance, a better and more flexible all-round language than Java.
*waits for anti-MS Java worshippers*
Re:Nokia Lumia 920 (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/java_csharp_comparison.html [harding.edu]
Weeee, look at how different it is.
It's so different.
It's clearly thinking different.
It's sooooooo different.
Re:Nokia Lumia 920 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nokia Lumia 920 (Score:3, Interesting)
As a C# guy, I find VB syntax to be a major inefficiency when I'm using it. That's not because VB is necessarily any less efficient, it's just that I'm thinking in C# and translating on the fly. So there are some valid personal reasons to dislike VB. I'm sure the exact opposite is true for you.
Then there's unsafe. That's the last thing VB still lacks that C# can do. It allows for all of the COM interop (ugh) to work. Without unsafe, there's no interop, or interop has to be coded directly in MSIL. Count your blessings on never having to work with unsafe code in a managed environment. If C is a gun that lets you shoot yourself in the foot, and C++ is a shotgun that will remove your leg with it, then C# with unsafe is a grenade with the pin pulled and you're wearing handcuffs.
On the other hand, VB has With and C# doesn't. But that's just a typing shortcut.
As for the background compiler, that hasn't been an issue, pretty much ever. Things that are compile-time checked will show up on a rebuild. Personally, I find VB's incessant bitching about errors caused by an incomplete line of code to be worse than C#'s lack of instant compilation checking.