BlackBerry Users Back-Handed Again By Marissa Mayer

Ouch! I'm sorry Yahoo! is no longer the King of Search Engines. Making an analogy to BlackBerry, Yahoo!'s search engine once held the reins of a huge search, news and multimedia empire, but that fate has long been changed since the company was out performed by Google for quite some time now. Breathing some fresh air into the company, former Google exec Marissa Mayer started to save the dwindling online portal by increasing her employees morale. One way to do this was by offering them a brand new smartphone with one caveat, employees can now choose from the latest models in the market as long as it is not a BlackBerry.

In a recent interview, she dismissed Waterloo's pride and joy by implying BlackBerry devices as not smartphones. She didn't outright say it, but that is clearly the message she sent when she said the following words for an interview with Fortune's Patricia Sellers last night:

A memo surfaced late September outlining the "Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun" program and we mentioned 5 reasons to add BB10 to the list of phones for her employees. Apparently she never got the memo. Last I checked my phone can do some pretty advanced stuff, like take pictures, connect to facebook and twitter, check the weather, check stocks, and most importantly send email. Oh and on top of that my "dumb" phone also has bluetooth, wifi and NFC connectivity, as well as mobile hotspot. BlackBerry 10 will be able to do all that and then some. Has this woman really been living under a rock?

It's a bit mind boggling when a company that is no longer at the cusp of their game kicks another one in the teeth right when it is about to get back on their feet running. If anything Ms. Meyer should have her entire engineering team look at how they can become the default provider of some other service that is not already available on the new BlackBerry10 platform and have it ready for BB10 launch. Heck maybe even try to convince RIM to reconsider their deal with Microsoft and remove Bing as a default search engine.

As smart as Ms Meyer may appear on paper, it seems she can't see the future of mobile computing in Blackberry 10. Ms. Meyer, saying BlackBerry is not a smartphone are fighting words. I'm not calling for an outright Yahoo! boycott, but as the BlackBerry community has shown in the past, we will not take this one sitting down. Take a second to send a tweet out to @MarissaMayer or send her a comment on Google+ to let her know how you feel about the situation.