Motorola still owns better than 80 percent of the public safety market share. They're not going anywhere.
Harris is good in the mix because they provide competitive systems, and competition ensures that nobody gets lazy. A monopoly would be VERY bad. It encourages laziness on the part of the only source you can go to.
The only stones you can throw at Motorola today are all related to their way of doing business. They're very
systems-focused, and it may get to the point that you can't just buy individual radios from them unless you
have an existing contract for a complete system already signed and in force. They don't consider the
sales of individual radios to be all that important now. I do think that's a mistake, but they'll soon learn
from it, I think.
They also need to get past the planned obsolescence. When they sell a new trunking system, the date at which the Astro firmware goes obsolete is already determined. They FORCE upgrades even when the older revision may suit the customer's needs FOREVER.
I strongly disagree with that model. I believe that stable system firmware releases are the way to go,
rather than selling new firmware to the customer every six months and giving them no real choice in the matter.
We all know that new software doesn't necessarly equate to better software. Remember XTS5000 CPS release 15.something, the one that corrupted radios left and right? Nice job, dummy! They had to issue a patched release to fix that problem.
Elroy
Harris is good in the mix because they provide competitive systems, and competition ensures that nobody gets lazy. A monopoly would be VERY bad. It encourages laziness on the part of the only source you can go to.
The only stones you can throw at Motorola today are all related to their way of doing business. They're very
systems-focused, and it may get to the point that you can't just buy individual radios from them unless you
have an existing contract for a complete system already signed and in force. They don't consider the
sales of individual radios to be all that important now. I do think that's a mistake, but they'll soon learn
from it, I think.
They also need to get past the planned obsolescence. When they sell a new trunking system, the date at which the Astro firmware goes obsolete is already determined. They FORCE upgrades even when the older revision may suit the customer's needs FOREVER.
I strongly disagree with that model. I believe that stable system firmware releases are the way to go,
rather than selling new firmware to the customer every six months and giving them no real choice in the matter.
We all know that new software doesn't necessarly equate to better software. Remember XTS5000 CPS release 15.something, the one that corrupted radios left and right? Nice job, dummy! They had to issue a patched release to fix that problem.
Elroy
