Warning: rant ahead. If any part of the content is not factual or overlooks things, feel free to inform me. No offense is meant to anyone nor is this intended to be an attack on anyone.
any chance someone will step in and bring Motorola back to greatness? I feel like the first steps would be cutting margins to make products more affordable, including all features out of the box for no extra charge, except for features that could potentially be misused which could be available at no cost on request (no more subscriptions/paid entitlement keys), not charging for CPS and perpetual firmware and CPS updates, providing ham radio pricing and feature sets (rebuilding their name in the ham community would lead to more familiarity with their products and would encourage hams that also do commercial work to implement Motorola commercially), and opening up APIs to lower the barrier for innovation on their products (radio apps, integrations into their solutions, check out mark43's open api).
They seem to be doing just fine in terms of rebuilding their public safety/private operations empire with an end to end software suites (command central), access control and security solutions (avigilon), body worn and in car camera solutions (watchguard acquisition, vigilant alpr), public safety and commercial LTE solutions (mcptt solutions, cbrs, handhelds, etc) and more
They have started offering many great software as a service solutions (command central, wave, kodiak, critical connect) but they really need to offer those solutions as both saas and self hosted (without strings attached like per user or device licencing) in order to make their way into departments that prefer to host themselves because it is more cost effective or because of the nature of their operations.
Specifically for their public safety products: Stop demanding that public safety users use P25 radios. Instead, make them more affordable and feature filled (out of box without fancy subscriptions or extra feature purchases) so that it just makes sense them. Create a multi modal radio like kenwood's NX5000 and NX3000 series that can handle P25 and DMR. If its not too much to ask, NXDN support would also be nice as some departments adopted NXDN because you wouldn't sell them a DMR solution in the public safety band and a multi mode radio and supporting multi mode ecosystem that would allow departments to transition to P25 if and how they saw fit would get you in the door there. Also, ham operators would love a multi mode and multi band radio from big M provided that it didn't cost an arm and a leg (which it doesn't have to to be profitable) and was easily programmable (again, no more $300 a year cps). A multi mode radio and multi mode infrastructure would be amazing for public safety interoperability as it would allow agencies to have direct contact with critical private organizations like railroad companies, oil and natural gas companies, and private security agencies that don't use P25 (either by adding their systems to radios or patching them through on the dispatch side, taking advantage of multi-mode infrastructure and base stations).
On the topic of TETRA: You are shooting yourself in the foot by denying the US TETRA products. I know that an airport in your backyard recently stood up a TETRA system and that's gotta hurt. If someone wants tetra, let them have tetra! Same goes for restricting the sale of your other products internationally.
International radios (I may be overlooking some regulatory somethings): I personally don't understand why you use different model numbers for your international radios when you can get away with using the same hardware and defining the operating country in CPS. Reducing the number of SKUs you have can help you so much! It also makes it broadens the second hand market for radios as they could now be easily sold to anyone anywhere without concern for being locked with certain region restrictions. If there are concerns about improper use of CPS and region assignment, offer a quick accessible and free course!
If it was up to me, I would start open sourcing many of their solutions, with appropriate licensing and copyright protections to prevent commercial rip offs (license clause that prohibits copy pasting/forking and selling but does not prohibit individuals or organizations from forking for their own use, available in many open source approved licenses). Open sourcing would allow agencies that are not in a position to purchase anything at all to have a great solution. Agencies that would purchase a closed source solution would still at the very least pay for a service license agreement as they still need a guarantee that the solution will work and will be fixed quickly if it breaks. To make the pricing of those SLAs simpler, they could be based on large brackets of user numbers instead of on individual user counts.
Another thing: Proudly publishing affordable MSRPs and allowing for quick and easy online direct from Motorola purchasing (add product to cart, enter payment details, purchase) would make purchasing and pricing a Motorola solution the easiest in the industry by far. I know this could disrupt the idea of radio dealerships and I'm not sure how I feel about dealerships but if you make SLAs and bidding go through dealerships they won't lose significant business. Those that would purchase online would be super small agencies and businesses, and hobby users that would not be in a position to negotiate pricing. That said, dealerships may or may not be a cause of high pricing and inaccessibility (dealerships need their cut and the high pricing allows dealerships lots of room to offer discounts for bids).
In order to ensure that users are aware that there are regulations and licenses required for radio operation, a warning banner could be shown on the product page and stickers could be placed on the radios and boxes. If there is significant concern for unlicensed usage, a brief free and accessible (no hoops, just sign up for free and start) self guided online course (similar to tait's free online radio courses) could be required to purchase products.
For the ham side: You don't have to create radically different ham and commercial products. You can either offer a public safety multi mode and band radio (same feature sets) in a slightly less rugged housing or ensure that your pricing for those is accessible to all (ideally less than $500 brand new).
On the topic of multi mode software driven radios: One affordable multi mode and multi band software based radio could replace at least 3 products in the motorola lineup, including the APX 1000/2000, APX 4000, APX 900, and Motorola XPR 7000 series, which would cut down on costs and organizational complexities. If designed as a flexible core module, it could easily replace the entire APX and XPR line of radios with that one core module that could easily be technician swapped across housings to convert from the compact apx900/xpr7500 form factor to the fancy new APX Next/Mototrbo ION form factor. For mobile radios, you would only need to have two or three variants of the mobile brick (different power outputs) and a few sets of control heads.
Accessories: You guys continue to offer so many slightly different variations of the speaker mic for the XPR/APX alone that it is almost comical. Cut that down to a few mics for XPR and APX. Define a few different use cases for speaker mics and create a product line for each (compatible with both XPR and APX).
One for law enforcement (APX XP speakermic with 3.5mm threaded jack) one for fire(xe500), one for general use (APX Remote Speaker Mic with emergency button and 3.5mm threaded jack), one for general with windorting and impress (APX remote speaker mic with emergency button and 3.5mm jack style, add a colored stripe or dot
Anywho, this has been my rant. Motorola, if you're reading, do these things! Many former Motorola employees would say that you have made some not so amazing decisions in the past 20 years and it's fairly evident from the outside that you are now trying to rebuild what you sold off. The times are changing and you have to put yourself back where you belong: far ahead of everyone else, dragging the rest of the market behind you into the world of tommorow.
micahguttman.com - hire me
