[ghshephard]

One element of the memo I was happy to see, was the dogfooding of Yahoo! Mail/Calendar, as in, people at Yahoo! will start using it rather than Microsoft Exchange. Sometimes I think powerful personalities at Yahoo! IT, with a bit too much money and people working for them, have caused a not insignificant amount of the downfall at Yahoo! by treating the company like it was a financial firm, or the Department of Defense, instead of a digital media destination. The Blackberry was an awesome communication devices from 1999-2005, but, 2008/2009+ (and certainly not 2012) is not the appropriate smartphone for a company that wants to be using the same system as their "digital media savvy" customers.

Those two steps will tell me if Mayer, a supposedly "technology" focussed CEO will be able to go head-head with Yahoo! IT. (It should say something that I even have to suggest the CEO of the company needs to go "head-head" with the IT organization)

[sriramk]

When at Yahoo, I had multiple flame wars with the exec in charge of the Blackberries decision. I was told in no uncertain terms how it was the only option due to security/other concerns and this person just didn't care much about the loss in productivity. Happy to see Marissa sorted that out in her first month.

[rdl]

Blackberries were the only reasonable choice at some point in the past. It's not reasonable to compare blackberries vs. other phones in 2006 or 2008 vs. 2011 or 2012.

[ghshephard]

Not only where they the only reasonable choice - they were the perfect choice - I can recall our entire executive team living on their blackberries non-stop. Before Push-Email, unlimited SMS (and IP based alternatives, like WhatsApp), and Enterprise IM became so predominant, blackberries were the best way of staying in 24x7 contact with everyone else.

I'll even make the argument that the Blackberry might have been the better choice in 2007/2008, and, just possibly, sneaking into 2009. The iPhone lacked reasonable exchange support for it's first iteration, push email wasn't there, and the Mobile Data Management (MDM) policies and security were slim to none.

But any company that was agile, and technologically savvy, and particularly those that were focussed on consumer digital strategies, started shifting over to the popular smartphones (IOS first, Android Second) by 2011 at the very latest. Yahoo! IT's love of the blackberry has held that company back. If every one of their engineers, and executives lived on an Android/iPhone, their mobile strategy would be seeing a lot more love.

The Department of Defense might make an argument for using blackberries. Yahoo! can't.

[sriramk]

No excuse to not switch when 2010 rolled around, especially when mobile became one of Yahoo's top priorities.

[rdl]

Yeah, I think the transition point was 2009-2010 with the 3GS and commercial MDMs. Deploying iPhone/Android today without an MDM is actually still worse in a corp environment than using blackberry+BES, and when the first iphones and androids came out, there was no MDM available.

I don't remember 2008-2009 all that well, but I think Airwatch was 2009, and there was some weak Zenprise support in late 2008.

[stcredzero]

> Sometimes I think powerful personalities at Yahoo! IT, with a bit too much money and people working for them, have caused a not insignificant amount of the downfall at Yahoo! by treating the company like it was a financial firm, or the Department of Defense, instead of a digital media destination

I've seen much the same thing happen at a company I worked at in the early late 1990's and early 2000's. The CIO had a heroic moment years ago and used the political capital to run IT as he saw fit, catering to the email/web needs on the sales/business side, but demonizing engineers who had more stringent needs. (Even to the point of a crony calling the complaining engineers "terrorists" in a public speech shortly after 9-11.)