I used to work for Moto, first in infrastructure for 8 years, then in subscriber for 2.
Yes, the analog flipphones Moto produced were pretty good. But Subscriber's GM decided that digital was a passing fad, and chose to ignore that market segment. Then they had to play catch-up, and decided that product quality wasn't all that important.
The first TDMA phone I had worked real well. Then I upgraded to the MicroDigital Lite because I wanted the vibrate feature. . That was a *real* piece of dog dropping. Turn on the vibrate mode, then plug in the cigarette lighter adapter, and it would no longer give *any* indication of incoming calls. And there were numerous other problems with it.
The StarTAC 7797 (dual band, dual-mode TDMA) I got to field test while I was there had many software and hardware bugs. We went through many software loads to get something that worked well enough to be released to the field, and *that* quality wasn't very good. The keypads would fail after six months or so of less-than-moderate use. TDMA 'buzz' is very loud in the earpiece when the transmitter is running at full power. It powers down by itself for no apparent reason. It powercycles for no apparent reason either. It locks up, requiring battery removal to reset.
I did my damnedest to create a comprehensive automated radio test system in Subscriber that would, in essence, prove that every feature, every software subsystem worked as intended. But management didn't care whether the software works. As long as they could make a million calls with a particular set of hardware and software, they would ship. They'd even ship if the quality wasn't there and their numbers started making them look bad.
I quit in March of 2000, and it felt *so* good to stop beating my head against that brick wall. My company contacts tel me nothing has changed, either. "Did the software load compile? Good! Throw it over the wall at the customer. " The only saving grace was that the GSM group actually did try to produce quality products. The CDMA and TDMA groups just didn't care.
Of course, it didn't help at all that *every* customer was a custom set of features and operations. Some CDMA customers wanted their phones to aggressively seek a CDMA signal whenever the phone was in analog mode; the result was that incoming calls from the analog system were missed. Often. Then the customers wanted the phones they received to work *only* on their system. Thus, a Verizon CDMA phone won't work on Sprint, an AT&T phone won't work on Cingular, and vice-versa.
Many of us low-level employees did our best to create good software and good test systems. But management just didn't care. All they cared about was making their numbers look good so they could collect their nice bonuses, even when the rest of us employees got no bonus at all.
Morale was, and still is, in the gutter there. A couple more rounds of management cleansing *might* make a difference. But until Chris Galvin gets off his rear and starts to act on the gross mis-management of Motorola, things just will not turn around. So you will continue to see faulty products in the field,and you will continue to see competitors gaining market share whilst Motorola keeps losing.
This phenomon is, by no means, limited to Motorola. Most large companies have the same problem. Nokia, Erickson, Lucent, Adelphia and many others simply cannot produce good, solid products and services, because management will not let them. Seems they just don't realize that, without customers,there can be no company.
Have I ranted enough yet?
You can check to see if Moto have a newer software release that could fix a number of your problems. Call the 800 number under the battery and ask about a re-flash with the latest code.
Sigh. Just thinking about it stresses me out. Oh, well. On to other things!
Fest3er
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