Oh come on - blackberries are a reasonable work phone even still. It handles corporate email and calendars quite well. Works great while travelling. More durable and cheaper than iphones/droids.
As a personal phone they are obviously well behind the curve.
Someone else touched on this, but I'll reiterate. If you're trying to restore a tech company to its former glory as cutting-edge, do you really want your employees using technology that's outdated compared to what an average middle-class couple buys for their teenage daughter?
More importantly, if you're a cutting-edge developer, do you really want to work at a company that's going to treat you like that?
Imagine a game company where the official game console of the company is the Atari 2600. Sure, it gets the job done, but to have an official piece of equipment that's vastly different (and markedly inferior) from what your users are using is a huge handicap.
Yahoo is a web company, which means they're a mobile company. Having the official company mobile phone be something that's old and crusty and unpopular is dangerously stupid.
What the hell? You're comparing a Blackberry to something that hasn't been in production for what...decades? Blackberry 9900 came out fairly recently and has a pretty damn good browser experience. I'm not sure why there's so much anti Blackberry sentiment here.
I agree that that it probably shouldn't be official policy to have Blackberries for employees, but if you're going to allow Android and iPhone, you might as well allow Blackberry for those who still want to keep it. It's not like we're talking about an IE6 type of burden here. The BB9900 browser is not crusty at all.
I was using hyperbole to illustrate how a piece of equipment that's good at its nominal job could still be a disastrous choice.
You say the BB9900 has a good browser experience. Pulling it up, I see the typical BB form factor with a half-sized screen and a keyboard. I don't care how objectively good that is, it doesn't match what Yahoo's users are using.
Beyond the browsing experience, apps are becoming more important all the time, and approximately nobody is building BB apps. Anybody at Yahoo using a BB phone, no matter how good or how recent, will get a deeply skewed view of what their users actually experience and expect.
Ditto - I'm incredibly happy with it, but pretty much any day I'm out of the office there's a good chance that by the time I'm heading home I'll have to call a taxi ahead of time because I know by the time I want it my phone will be asleep.
It's my biggest issue with BBs now, especially when you think about how great they used to be with battery life.
Switch back to 2G. You get all the important bits of the BB experience (email, messaging) and easily 3 days battery life, compared to 1 day on 3G doing the same things. I'm a happy 9900 owner.
Other than when I want to browse a few web pages without waiting ages, when I switch on 3G or wifi, I'm on 2G all the time. It does help a huge amount, but still not enough.
Admittedly I have a twitter client that gets updates regularly, plus three-digit emails a day, plus usually a fair few calls... but still I feel it should last way longer.
As a personal phone they are obviously well behind the curve.