Marissa Mayer Just Gave Every Yahoo Employee An iPhone 5

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just sent an email to all of Yahoo’s full time and part time employees in the US, promising them a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone.

“People are happy,” says a source at the company.

A couple weeks ago, we reported that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was considering giving every Yahoo employee a new iPhone or Android smartphone.

Mayer has now put that plan into motion through a program Yahoo is calling “Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!”

We learned about this plan from an internal memo, which we received from one source and confirmed with another.

Through the program, Yahoo employees will have a choice of phones: iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, or Nokia Lumia 920.

Yahoo is also going to pay its employees data and phone bills.

Yahoo is also going to discontinue IT support for Blackberry phones.

Giving employees blazing fast new smartphones will certainly boost morale at Yahoo – just like free food will – but that’s not the whole point.

According to the memo, the idea is for Yahoo employees to use the phones that Yahoo users are using.

“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.”

That’s pretty smart. The program will cost Yahoo a few million dollars, which is pocket change for a company with annual revenues in the billions of dollars. The benefit will be a more informed and motivated workforce.

Here’s a memo that just went out:

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 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.

Moving forward, we’ll offer you a choice of devices as well as provide monthly plans for the data and phone.

The smartphone choices that we are including in the program are:

* Apple iPhone 5
* Android:
– Samsung Galaxy S3
– HTC One X
– HTC EVO 4G LTE
* Windows Phone 8:
– Nokia Lumia 920

We’re getting started right away and taking orders starting now.

Via: Business Insider

More: The Nokia Blog, WMPoweruser, TechCrunch, iPhone in Canada Blog, CNET, The Next Web, TechnoBuffalo, 9to5Mac and VentureBeat