Ransom: Customer Data
http://www.zdnet.com/filters/printerfriendly/0,6061,2637528-2,00.html
Motorola's Getting to Know You
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/10/0328222&mode=thread
to understand why you need to be concerned about this.
Dear Sir or Madam,
Since being informed this morning of Motorola's abusive practices towards its two-way radio dealers, I have posted the following, in which I advise others who might use Motorola products, or any product which might come from a subsidiary of Motorola to avoid purchasing it and to make the reasons for their decision known to their retailer or Motorola representative.
Please keep in mind that Motorola is a large company with enormous business interests at stake. Abusive marketing practices such as these can affect your revenues in ways dramatically greater than any small gain you may hope to achieve in marketing your radios. Consider the cost to you of losing a design win for one of your chips in a mass-market product, as I advise in the following:
As written at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/10/0328222&cid=174
First I'd like to suggest that some big motorola customers get together and visit an attorney and have them write up a contract. This contract will state that, in return for purchasing products from a Motorola dealer, the dealer agrees to hold the customer's demographic information confidential, and forbid it to be shared with any third party - specifically name Motorola, but also say any third party.
If the dealer won't sign, ask them if they carry any of Motorola's competitors' products, and buy those instead. Alternatively, shop around for Motorola dealers willing to sign.
Rememeber, your information is your information, and while there may be no law to protect you, if the dealer signs such a contract, then you have civil law to protect you.
When such a contract has been drafted, put it on a web page and distribute the URL widely so that all Motorola customers may benefit.
Secondly, keep in mind that Motorola is a huge company. They have interests around the globe. Interested in buying a Mac? Print out the ZDNet article and bring it with you to the Apple dealer. Tell them you want to look inside the case of the Mac you're considering purchasing. Tell them you'd be happy to make the purchase if the PowerPC chip was manufactured by IBM, but you won't consider purchasing a Mac containing a Motorola brand PowerPC - the chip was jointly designed by Apple, IBM and Motorola and is actually manufactured by IBM and Motorola (multiply sourced). Second sourcing means you as a consumer have a choice.
Also look around you and think about what products you use that are made by Motorola. Do you do MacOS, BeOS, or QNX development? How about embedded or game consoles? Perhaps then you use Metrowerks Codewarrior for your development system (compiles for Windows too - I vastly prefer it to Visual C++ or Borland). Metrowerks is now a Motorola subsidiary. If so, drop a line to any contacts you may have at Metrowerks, give the URL to the ZDNet article, and ask them to let the folks they know at Motorola that this practice is unacceptible.
Do you actually design embedded hardware? Consider alternatives to Motorola products - again, IBM has some altnernatives - and let your rep at Motorola know that you're not going to b needing his services anymore - and tell him why.
Some links for you: