Russell Beattie

To continue beating up on Moto a bit... I'm going through emails today (for the past week or so... I'm a bad man) and I ran across the first Motorola Developer Newsletter I received after signing up for their MotoCoder.com dev site to get the free copy of Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Studio they're offering online. The first item is about a mini-conference they're holding in London next week:

MOTOCODER� 2003 -- Entertainment Workshop

Register today for the first MOTOCODER� Entertainment Workshop in London, 15-16 April. Two full days of technical and business sessions where you can talk with experts in the field and learn about the opportunities in mobile entertainment. Each attendee will receive a free, fully licensed version of CodeWarrior� Wireless Studio, a Motorola� 3G phone, and be able to meet face-to-face with key Motorola decision makers and engineers.

The cost of the conference is $495 which gets you both entrance to the sessions and a new Motorola 3G phone (which I assume is the Motorola A830).

All I can say is "huh?!?!" What is Motorola thinking?

I repeat again that I want Motorola to succeed, but I can never seem to grok what they're doing. Charging sooo much money for a conference of such a specific focus and a phone that is pretty cool, but may not have a lot to do with the mass market that most Mobile Entertainment developers want to target is pretty dumb ass.

More than half of the conference seems to be Motorala focused propaganda. They want me to pay to listen to them talk about how great their phones and technologies are? 1/3rd does seem useful, but why charge so much money for it? If Motorola really wanted to attract a viable developer community (thus making compelling applications targeting their platforms) they need to provide a conference that costs A LOT less money or even free. Then announce that there'll be "deals" on 3G phones for attendees. You'd have to be REALLY into Moto to want to attend this conference, in my opinion.

Let's compare. The time and cost of this conference is similar to the cost of the Symbian conference. But developing for Symbian allows you to target a range of phones with a variety of languages (C++, Java, WAP/XHTML, etc.) whereas a Motorola conference allows you only to concentrate on Motorola. Maybe what they're doing is encouraging only the hard-core developers to show, but the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me. Once again I read about something that Motorala is doing and think, "huh? instead of "cool..."

Come on Moto! Get it together!

-Russ