The shareprice of RIM, Blackberry’s maker, has dropped over the last year and the developments by Apple, Samsung and Nokia mean that their devices have outstripped the Blackberry. So there has already been a lot of speculation on the demise of RIM. But I held out some home, after all it’s the device of choice for large organisations because of its high level of security and general reliability. Well that reputation of reliability has come under fire, but still changing devices for thousands of people is a biggish cost.
Yahoo! have now offered their employees a choice of smart phone;
- Apple iPhone 5
- Android
Samsung Galaxy S3
HTC One X
HTC EVO 4G LTE - Windows Phone 8
Nokia Lumia 920
Blackberry is not on the list, according to the memo sent out and quoted by Business Insider, Yahoo! will no longer provide or support Blackberrys. The motivation is said to be that Yahoo! employees should be using the same devices as their customers so that they understand the user experience.
It’s an interesting motivation, using web analytics Yahoo will be able to see which devices their customers use to access their services. Clearly Blackberry users are a minority, and now Yahoo is removing Blackberrys from their workforce you can be sure that the design decisions will not include optimising for Blackberry. Adding to the limited user experience of Blackberry users.
I have a blackberry for work. It’s an old model but my company doesn’t hand out new phones on an regular basis. I’ve always found it hard to use, and increasingly I use it only as a phone as I can get my emails/calendar on my iPad, and both my smartphone or my iPad give better experience for internet and apps.
But I work for a bank with fewer resources for such changes and perhaps less reason to make this switch. Even so, there is talk of ‘bring your own device‘ programmes and I don’t think any of my colleagues will choose to bring a Blackberry.
.
Images blackberry
Blackberry Pie: Final /Dylan Hardesty/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Change Meme 