I understand the concept behind what she is doing... but she should focus on making the employees happy through getting them working on meaningful and innovative products and not by just giving them a bunch of free stuff. I have multiple contacts at Yahoo and all of them will tell you that the stuff they do there is mainly just maintenance work. And I've heard the same story from all of them: they only work a few hours a day. The rest of the time they are playing basketball, working out, or doing power yoga or pilates. It seems that their priorities aren't in order.

> I understand the concept behind what she is doing... but she should focus on making the employees happy through getting them working on meaningful and innovative products and not by just giving them a bunch of free stuff.

Giving them smartphones that are used by their majority of their users and employees will understand the pain points felt by them.

I work at Yahoo and I don't know anyone that only puts in 3 hours of work/day. In a 14k+ employee company, I'm not going to claim every single person is putting forth 110% effort (you have slackers everywhere), but apathy is certainly not the norm by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it an acceptable attitude.

And there are quite a few teams at Y! working on meaningful and innovative projects. I work on one that I'd personally consider is both of those.

If I was running Yahoo today, I'd want all of my employees to have a smart phone, be using it, and be thinking about where computing was headed. Phone and data costs should not be an excuse. And when I say smartphone I mean a REAL smartphone. Having employees using Blackberries isn't helping Yahoo move forward in mobile.

Oh yea for sure. Tons of companies provide smart phones for their employees, it's a nice perk. My statement is more based around this new free phones thing, the announcement of free food to the employees, etc. They are pitching it as if free stuff to employees is going to turn the company around. Obviously making the employees happier and better connected will help, but I haven't heard of anything technical that they are doing to further the company.

Perhaps Mayer should have randomized distribution so that Yahoo's mobile offerings would be consumed by employees via all three platforms. Perhaps the downside is that loyalists to a particular platform would just use their personal phones instead if another platform was forced upon them.

Superficially that seems ok, but it won't come across that way. By letting the employees decide for themselves they will feel far more empowered - contrast that against "a random number generator says you get this phone - deal with it".

And what will happen in the good teams is that they will work it out amongst themselves. And maybe they'll get them in proportion to the market, or maybe they will swap phones every month, or maybe they will come up with other good ideas. But if they don't feel in control they are far less likely to act as though they are.