Motorola is one of the strangest company you'd meet. The latest stunt can be a chapter in some product marketing MBA course. Create two products, one with ordinary specification (let's call it Milestone), price it along with competition, and create a similar one, throw in some better hardware (say a faster CPU, a better camera etc, let's call it XT720) and charge 30% premium for it. So far, so good. Many luxury brands charge a lot of extra without much justification, and we'll leave it to free market whether the numbers are correct. So we have 2 types of fooled people in the market, 90% of them paid INR 22k for Milestone, and 10% with lesser intelligence who paid 27k for a XT720. This smaller section has a false sense of eliteness that they are premium customer of a till reputed company, and eligible for a better treatment, much like a business class passenger would expect. The stock phones run Android 2.1 Eclair, and when they went on sale, Android 2.2 was out already, and expectation was a company will stand by its products and make the updates available to both models.
And then comes the twist. Motorola tells the people who paid them much higher in simple terms
go screw yourselves. And that too, too late, after several of the XT720s have been sold, with the hope that it has much higher chance of running Froyo (Android 2.2) than its cheaper sibling, for which upgrade was announced a while ago. This devastated the hope of XT720 users, and the feeling of being cheated was widespread in Motorola
support forums and their facebook pages, with
petitions to release a software update on which Motorola responded with a sugar coated fuck you. They didn't even agree to unlock the bootloader, and advised users to
buy a google nexus if they wanted to run a better software. So, this is where we ask an interesting question to marketing/business students: does it make business sense to cheat the expectation of your premium class of customers (Of course they are expected to be fewer in count anyways)? Running empty club class is nothing new to airlines but even a single occupant gets enough care to buy his return ticket.
After being left high and dry, the XT720 user community decided to do something better with their phone. It comes with good hardware, for which they paid a heavy price, and throwing it away is a luxury most can't afford. Froyo 2.2 is important for 2 updates among other things: the JIT compiler can run your code 4x faster, and applications can be run off SD cards. With Quadrant score of 600, very little internal space to accommodate any more apps, we needed Froyo to use the phone's full potential. The first thing happened is a fork in xda-developer community, and a
dedicated section for XT720. Some effort was done to port the JIT compiler back to 2.1, which raised the Quantum benchmark to as high as 867 (for me); and a few hacks to copy the application packages to an ext2 partition of SD card and symbolic linking directories, but they had their own pains and it was understood that a complete port of 2.2 is needed. So the community decided to hire a developer themselves, buy him a phone and support his effort by raising money. We found unbelievable trust among the community, and within a week a dev was identified, money was raised by donation (most of the people paid a good sum even before anything was concrete), and
Dexter was on it. Based on a 2.2 rom of Korean motoroi, in 2 weeks time, Dexter published his first
Froyo port for XT720, and multiple offshoots thereafter. Another huge appreciation here was almost whole community participated in beta testing, risking their phone getting bricked (or unusable, or hardware damage), and started reporting bugs and contributing patches. Ordinary people started opening the hood of the new ROM and trying to guess what might be going wrong. A few iterations later, the rom is running pretty stable. And still fixes are going in. And it gave unbelievable performance boost to the phone, after overclocking the CPU it beats all phones in the market (see attached figure, on left it is 2.1 with backported JIT and on right 2.2).
So followup questions to business students: if the answer to previous question was in the line of unjustified return of investment ratio (too few customers, not worth spending upgrade method), would the answer change now since it is proven to be 1 person's 2-week part time effort?
Maybe Motorola with get away with it, as none will care as much about the sinking ship anyways.
Full disclosure:
I'm a member of xda-developers community, I donated my share of Euros to Dexter, and later contributed patches for 2.2 ROM.
