It takes a lot of money and effort to migrate that kind of infrastructure, and as I'm sure everyone has noticed, Yahoo doesn't exactly have tons of money to spare to overhaul something that works just because it's not "cool".
That said, I agree with OP that it should be done, if it's possible. Maybe if you wait until after you lay off 10k employees, you'll have less devices to migrate ;-)
It's not just a question of "cool", it's a question of relevance. A good friend of mine was issued a BlackBerry by her corporate IT department (part of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firm). For her it's fine, since she's essentially a sales engineer for big pharma. She doesn't need access to a high end mobile web browser, or any of the other features you'll find on any 'normal' smartphone sold these days.
But, if her job was to build next-generation web-hosted services, her notion of what was possible, normal, and bleeding-edge in the mobile web space would be hopelessly out of sync with the hundreds of millions of Android and iOS users out there.
> if her job was to build next-generation web-hosted services, her notion of what was possible
I'd say anyone in that position really ought to be trying stuff out on multiple mobiles to get a good feel for it, while using the phone of their choice (even if it's a Nokia 3310).
RIM does seem to have a marketing problem as it seems most Blackberry users have only ever used the old built in house Java based browser. This is due to the fact that WebKit has only been on the newer devices and you can still get older devices so users that used to have a Blackberry, but have had an iphone for X years probably only experienced the Java browser. If someone gets a modern Blackberry from their IT department the WebKit browser that it comes with is good and can hold its own.
Presumably what people want is email and maybe chat on their personal device. Is that it? Clearly you dump Microsoft Exchange servers and the whole poisonous 'back office' cling that brings and what are you left? As an operations guy I hear people tell horror stories about blackberry integration and I'm wondering what it was that they 'got' in order to put up with that pain?
