I posted a while back about a dinner I had with some other analysts with Dan Hesse, the new CEO of Sprint. At the time, I said that I came away from that dinner with more confidence than I had had in a while about Sprint’s prospects.

Well, I’ve just come away from Sprint’s analyst event and it’s been a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s always good to get a deeper dive into everything a company of Sprint’s size is working on - there’s always a lot more beneath the surface that you just can’t get into in one evening’s discussion over dinner, and some of that detail is reassuring and impressive. On the other hand, there were other things - some specific initiatives but also some themes and trends which emerged over the day and a half of the event - which were more worrying.

On the positive side:

• Sprint has three clear strategic priorities: fixing the customer experience, establishing a clear brand in the market, and focusing on profitability. This clarity of purpose and focus on fundamentals is a good thing, and the key will be to execute on it without adding a raft of additional initiatives and programs over the coming months. Sprint needs to get the basics right before it gets distracted again.
• Accountability is being pushed down throughout the organization, with four business units each having their own P&L, and customer satisfaction in particular being made a component of bonus structures for everyone except salespeople. This is a big and positive change from the previous administration.
• The iDEN network’s capacity problems have been fixed, partly because so many customers have left but partly although through targeted investment and a better approach to managing capacity. As such it is now performing at ‘best-ever levels’.

These are all important steps, and the key will be consistency in sticking with them.

But on the negative side:

• In many of the conversations over the past couple of days, I got the sense that Sprint is relying heavily on its WiMAX initiative (soon to be Clearwire) to fix many of its problems. It was a bullet point on so many of its slides. But it won’t make a meaningful contribution until late 2009 at the earliest, and even then the scale of that contribution is up in the air. It worries me that it seems to be something that Sprint is relying on so much.
• To a much smaller extent, Sprint used its forthcoming Samsung Instinct device as an indicator of several of its key initiatives. I believe they’re using the one device to represent a wider range of devices, but it was worrying how often that one particular device was used, and how few other groundbreaking devices Sprint has in the pipeline. It was used to illustrate Sprint’s commitments to  openness, innovation, usability, and touch screen devices in general, and it is Sprint’s main answer to the iPhone, but I believe it falls well short of the iPhone in a number of key ways. And that’s a little worrying too, because it suggests Sprint is banking on a single device too much, and also that it isn’t able accurately to gauge its position in the market.
• Sprint also appeared to be in denial about its competitiveness against Verizon and AT&T, its two major competitors in the business market. Its proposed differentiators - even in future - were things it has claimed to be doing for the past four or five years, with the key thrusts being WiMAX (again), convergence (which was once a differentiator but no longer is) and flexibility (the flip side of being sub-scale) - something there is some merit in, but probably not a key element of its differentiation strategy. I believe Sprint faces substantial competitive disadvantages against these two companies in particular and I don’t see any way for Sprint to overcome those in the short term.
• Because of all the trouble Sprint has faced, it has less money to spend on advertising and investment in its business, and it continues to suffer all the effects of running multiple networks. These problems are insurmountable in the short term (especially without a Nextel spinoff) and simply compound the other problems.
• The new “Now Network” tagline is nowhere near as easy to comprehend as Verizon’s or AT&T’s key messages, which are immediately understandable and compelling to any ordinary user. Even the next level of detail - around speed and usability for data services - doesn’t lend itself easily to a one-line pitch to consumers. And so even though Sprint is clearer about what it means than it was in the “most powerful network” days, I’m not sure its customers will be.
• In several of these areas, perceptions still lag reality. The iDEN network - both in terms of reliability and Sprint’s commitment to it - still suffers from negative perceptions which are arguably no longer in keeping with reality. But Sprint is also still suffering from the lack of clarity about its positioning in the market, despite its formidable network assets, customer base and heritage.

For all these reasons, even though I’m positive about Sprint’s potential to turn things around, I’m not yet convinced that it will actually be able to turn things around and in many ways the deck still seems stacked against it. But I think the leadership team and basic strategy are in place to give it a great chance at success if execution finally matches the strategy - something that has been sorely lacking at Sprint for the last several years.