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.
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.