Sprint's Hesse maintains 'boring' company priorities

James Fisher from Sprint here. I would note that the shareholder issue regarding ability to call a special meeting is not necessarily just occuring when shareholders "express...displeasure with the company's trajectory." It is a measure being approved by shareholders in a variety of cirumstances at a variety of companies.

James Fisher of Sprint. As a shareholder here I can tell you that we are mad and you are clueless. You people in KC took two working companies and turned them into rubbish.

Dan Hesse should REMOVE the word NEXTEL for the company, you ask why? There is nothing left of NEXTEL at Sprint. All the policies coming down from KC are all pre-merge Sprint policies. All ideas and policies that Nextel had are gone, removed, whipped out, purged along with almost all Nextel managers and staff. I can tell you for a fact, as a shareholder and an ex-employee that there is a mission to delete all that was Nextel. The KC office is hell bent on returning Sprint to it pre-merge state and all of its small minded policies! Nextel died this last layoff and Dan Heese should remove the Nextel name too, he has removed everything else so why not the name? How many Legacy Nextel directors are in the company? How many Legacy Nextel layer 3,4,5 managers are there left, how many Lagacy Nextel IC are there left? I'll bet you will find that ratio to be about a 30:1 for every 30 Legacy Sprint Employee you will find only 1 Legacy Nextel. The dirty little secret that Sprint does not want anyone to know is this last layoff was in fact to get rid of as many Nextel people as possible. In the market I was in I only knew of 2 Legacy Sprint people leaving, while 38 Legacy Nextel people either were laid off or left because they could not support the failure anymore. I watched 10 and 15 and 20 year vets who were top notch people walk away this go-round. I watched layer 3 and 4 and 5 managers that were protecting the IC from KC walk out because they just could not fight KC anymore. I was one of them that was in the fight but found that I could not win. KC is now taken over and there is a big brother now running all facets of Sprint from KC. How very SAD! I just hope Sprint does not go under before they pay out my package!

Dear Obvious Anonymous Nextel Alum.

As a previous employee of both companies, pre and post merger I can tell you that the management in Nextel was far too weak to offer policies and procedures that would be useful to the merged entity. There were some good executives and managers, but the culture and network architecture were insufficient to grow beyond what Nextel had become. Obviously Donahue knew this, and he was smart to enter into the merger. Nextel's network was dead on arrival, and there's nothing any company could have done about it - the iDen network was inadequate, and there was no path forward other than to sell it and run away with fistfulls of cash, or merge and make it someone else's problem. Donahue - a genius - managed to do both.

Sprint suffered from a whole different set of problems. Sprint has been an employer tantamount to welfare for a large population of technology-illiterate plodders who put a drain on the whole company's operations and development pipeline. There are some good people in Sprint, but they are not willing or able to come to the rescue of a company as sick as Sprint. Sprint also wastes money on incredibly useless technology (One Billion on qchat, no kidding), and has no end to end accountability when products do not meet the needs of its customers. Customer service, is unbelievably STILL a problem after six years of misfired reforms.

The difference: Sprint made a good technology choice in CDMA and deployed EvDO and EvDO rev A quickly and effectively. Their network architecture is regionally distributed and well managed, and it is FAST (try it). It is really that simple - Sprint has invested heavily in making their network the best, and it has pretty much worked (although they have reached the end of usefulness with the CDMA line). Had we constructed a network with Data Services in mind at Nextel, things would've been different I'm sure. But that was just not our priority.

Your weak conspiracy theory is just wrong. There is no pro-KC or pro-Sprint effort. There is just an ever-shrinking battalion of non-innovative thinkers (of Nextel AND Sprint lineage) , with a dusting of real quality players who are probably just sad to see everything in decline and are counting down the days till they get re-badged as Ericsson employees.