Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ditches the staff BlackBerry

Yahoo is abandoning Research in Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones as its internal work phone platform, according to a leaked internal memo.

In late August, speculation first emerged that Yahoo would be the latest in a string of companies to abandon the troubled smartphone platform.

According to Business Insider, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is giving employees a choice of moving to an Apple iPhone 5, one of three Android smartphones (including Samsung’s Galaxy S3, HTC One X or HTC EVO 4G LTE) or a Nokia Lumia 920 running Windows Phone 8. The company will pay employee phone and data bills while discontinuing internal IT support for BlackBerry.

In the memo, Mayer writes: “We have a very exciting update to share with you today – we are announcing Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!”

“As of today, Yahoo is moving off of [sic] BlackBerries as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries. A few weeks ago, we said that we would look into smartphone penetration rates globally and take those rates into account when deciding on corporate phones.”

“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.”