Yahoo is starting to sound like a cool place to work, at least under the leadership of its recently appointed CEO Marissa Mayer. This weekend, a leaked memo to all of the company"s full and part-time team members reveals that Mayer is giving everyone at Yahoo a very nice incentive.
According to a report at Business Insider, the memo announced that Yahoo employees can now participate in its new program called (we are not making this up) "Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!" The program offers them the choice of five smartphones for free, along with Yahoo paying for all of their data and phone bills.
One of the five smartphones on Yahoo"s free list is, interestingly, the Windows Phone 8-based Nokia Lumia 920, which hasn"t even been launched yet. The other phones on the list include the already released Samsung Galaxy S III, the HTC One X, and the HTC EVO 4G LTE. It also adds the Apple iPhone 5, which goes on sale on September 21st.
It would be interesting to learn how many Yahoo employees decide to wait for the Lumia 920. Nokia hasn"t even announced an official release date for the smartphone, although it should be coming out in the next few weeks.
RIM got the short end of this stick. Yahoo also revealed in this memo that it will discontinue support for its Blackberry smartphones for employees. The memo says, "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." Clearly, Yahoo doesn"t believe BlackBerry is being used by most of its customers.
Source: Business Insider | Image via Nokia