There has been for several years a serious problem with the Sierra Wireless EM7345 LTE chip. My professional cronies and I believe it's a firmware problem, most likely brought on by attenuated developer team deadlines and market pressures. Either way, the thing sucks and it's been installed in all our company laptops. Thus originates my problem.
People seek IT help from our department and I (being in that department) try in my humble fashion to oblige. Hey, when the rest of the world's happy, I'm happy. But some people get sad when their LTE card can't connect to the nearest cell tower (and who can blame them? The big bad world with no Internet is substantially bigger and badder). I work with the Operations end of my department to put the spring back in their step. It's uphill work with these EM7345's though - have I mentioned that they suck? They're 4G LTE / 3G HSPA enabled devices, and they often act like they have the same firmware as a high-end juicer, or the door sensor of a 1940s-era trolley car - neither of which is capable of switching their wireless internet connectivity from one ISP's cell tower to another. But perhaps to those devices you might extend a little slack; they're not designed to do that. The EM7345 merits no slack because it's designed to do exactly that.
But that's not (entirely) Lenovo's fault.
It seemed like the fulfillment of a prophet's dream - selling Windows as a Service™ and reaping golden piles of lucre for decades to come. They had faith in their product, their teams, their leadership, their timing - what could go wrong?
Several things did. In fact they're not done going wrong yet. Windows 10 [Update: look out, here comes Windows 11] has the types of problems that have sticking plaster stuck on and therefore you kind of groan about and live with them - but it also has actively harmful, catastrophic problems that only affect you if your environment is "unusual". Like if your computer has an internet connection, I guess, or a "Documents" folder. Weird stuff like that.
The IT hardware game can range from blissfully free of competitors (at least for an hour or two if you were first to the market) to "there's not a hope in hell of making our money back on this, we need to orphan this product, like, last week." Plus, each layer of corporate beareuacracy between you and the people who are complaining about your product is a blessing and a curse. They bless you with their torpor and they curse you with their diplomatic tight-lippedness. Unless you ask, or unless their leadership wants to make the odd "example case", or unless they make an exception for the sheer volume of plaintive user screams, you aren't gonna hear the bad news about your product, at least while there's time to fix it - if indeed there is time to fix it.
So long story short, our users can't get to the internet on their own and need to pull into a McDonald's or a Starbucks or visit their Aunt Myrtle Who Lives Just Across Town for a few minutes to borrow her wifi. This is not "enterprise computing" and the people we paid to do better than this, know it. But the responsibility for inflicting such First World Hardship upon us, to be scrupulously fair, is Not (Entirely) Lenovo's Fault.
