By Stephen Pate
with stories from Phone Scoop and Bloomberg
Motorola, the original handset manufacturer, is getting read to exit the biz. Phone Scoop reports they may be laying off half their workforce.
“Phone Scoop has learned that Motorola’s handset division is expecting a large round of layoffs as soon as this week, according to someone familiar with Motorola’s plans. The layoffs are confirmed to be significant and may amount to 50% of the entire handset operation.”
That would be no surprise to me: my last Motorola RAZR is a case of unfinished engineering. The software to sync with Outlook never worked no matter how hard I pushed support. If you pick it up on your hand, as opposed to your mouth, the ringer can be inadvertently turned off.
Bloomberg reports 4,000 layoffs for the struggling cell mfg.an. 15 “(Bloomberg) — Motorola Inc., the second-biggest U.S. seller of mobile phones, cut an additional 4,000 jobs as consumer demand languishes under the strain of the recession.”
The recession is a precipitating event. The reality is Motorola lost their way when competitors had more than human engineering behind their phones. They were easier to use in today’s connected world.
I’ve been using Motorola phones since those bricks back in the 1980’s. I had a cool voice activated car phone in 1988 that would respond to “Call Home” with a robot voice. The StarTAC was a revolutionary small phone that re-defined how small a cell phone could be. My brother who worked for Siemens was responsible for product development of the StarTac screens and early development of the color plasma for cell phones.
Motorola knows technology but what they don’t understand is how to write software that is easy to use. Samsung, Nokia and other phone manufacturers have less arrogant development teams that are not living in the past like Motorola. Their reaction to the bad software problem on the RAZR told me three years ago they were history. Snooze you lose in this market.
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