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Motorola To Cut 4,000 Jobs, Focus On High-End Devices
jfruh writes "Motorola Mobility is facing its first major public shakeup after its acquisition by Google and it's not pretty for many employees. The company will be laying off thousands of workers as it attempts to reorient itself away from feature phones and toward more profitable high-end devices."
Is there a race to the bottom in the sense that if all handset makers abandon the low-end market to focus on higher-margin smartphones, competition will increasingly erode those margins?
FWIW if I were making smartphones, the overriding lesson I would take from the iPhone is "make just one model". It's high risk, but selling phones seems to be about marketing first and technology second, so putting all your marketing muscle behind one model doesn't seem like a bad idea.
According to TFA, they're shifting strategy to make fewer devices, which I hope will be better than the things they've been churning out.. I suppose this is Apple's strategy, which has certainly worked well for them.
Hopefully a smaller product range will also allow for better after-market support. My phone is an Atrix, and I liked the hardware, but the software support has been lacklustre to say the least.
I've made a couple posts in the past regarding how I don't think anyone has ever spent sufficient effort to make a genuinely good feature/dumb phone. Too much effort is put on super-monetization-- from proprietary versions of internet connectivity to downloading Java games, there's just too much bloat in even the simplest of modern phones.
Here's what I would want from a proper modern feature phone:
Hardware:
**A telephone with a particularly good speaker and receiver, speaker phone
**A slideout QWERTY keyboard
**An MP3/Ogg/etc. player with equalizer and 3.5mm jack
**A camera that focuses on image quality, not color mods
**Bluetooth
**micro-SD card slot
**Alarm clock with calendar
**Some standard ringers with the functionality to play a ringer from micro-SD
**Chargeable by micro-USB cord
**With all the weight saved, get a better/larger battery
**Minimal animation/graphics. No need to burn battery on things NO ONE cares about.
No web access, no pic sending, no games, no playing or recording video. Just Phone, text, camera, music, alarm, and long battery life. Something that just works and works for a long time.
Is there a race to the bottom in the sense that if all handset makers abandon the low-end market to focus on higher-margin smartphones, competition will increasingly erode those margins?
FWIW if I were making smartphones, the overriding lesson I would take from the iPhone is "make just one model". It's high risk, but selling phones seems to be about marketing first and technology second, so putting all your marketing muscle behind one model doesn't seem like a bad idea.
First of the "race to the bottom" is a phrase used by those promoting Apple to give the illusion that competing products are of inferior quality, due to Apple able to charge a massive mark-up to their inferior products. What really happens is good old competition, and price is just one of the things Apple competitors are able to compete on. Its why the same market has phones with Projectors; Game Pads; Waterproofing; Digital TV Receivers; With a massive array of different sized screens; CPU's and Memory, hitting several different price ranges. What in reality they compete on is "Value for Money".
HTC and Motorola are decreasing their product lines...and its not just to make the economies of producing less phone is cheaper. Its simply that the added value of having phones in their product lines that are too similar to other phones of theirs does not exist...in fact its damaging. The days of get more wall space in the shop from having more phones has gone.
As for learn from Apple, Ask yourself if the iPhone had Huawei, HTC, Sony, or in the context of the article Motorola on the cover of would any customers buy it.
1: Make one or two really good smartphones per year one of which should be of the "prime quality" status.
2: Do not ever lock up the boot loader. In fact make it easy for geeks to do whatever they want with the device.
3: Get rid of the so called MotoBlur or make it an option.
4: Make the phone a real beauty to look at. It should capture one's attention out of the box, i.e. by default. Google for some mock-up images. There are plenty.
5: Make it rugged that a small fall still leaves it working.
6: Make it easy for users to return defective devices, do not let the media define your product unless their definition is in your favor.
7: Advertise, advertise, advertise.
Imagine a world where you get home, pop your cell phone into a doc and bang you're running your phone as a full desktop with all the cpu/memory power+some of your current giant 500 watt system sitting under your desk, but it still has a standby battery life of days and full usage of hours.
Then you feel like laying in bed and reading a book, you pop your phone out of the desktop doc and doc it in your 7-10" tablet device and bang you're running a tablet with all the same apps and data.
It is coming.
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Google’s law firm of choice for intellectual property matters, Quinn Emmanuel, is also representing Samsung, Motorola, and HTC in litigation with Apple over patent infringement.
Apple are attacking Android publicly. I personally can only see Google supporting Samsung...and others. That was kind of the point of the Google acquiring Motorola in the first place.
There was a story this weekend about google paying 50% wages to surviving partners/family for several years.
What I want is not a dock for my phone, but to have its screen be stretchable to adjust the resolution. Extend the canvas out for when you want that extra real estate, but collapse it back down when you want it to fit in your pocket.
"So how could AT&T continue to sell the 3GS as an entry-level smartphone after the 4S was introduced? Did Apple really overproduce that many units?"
Yes Apple does manufacturer more than one model at the time, but they have a whole year to put their developers, marketers, logistics people, designers, behind one model, Once they do that, those costs are done and in the case of the 3GS -- can be spread out over 3 years.
Compare that to the typical Android OEM that manufacturers 10 or 12 phones a year. Apple's huge profit markets are partially due to the economies of scale by being able to buy one set of components for all of their phones.
It is coming.
I have a different vision:
You get home and your smart phone is already synced to your full desktop/laptop, so anything you did on the phone all day is available on your desktop/laptop.
Then you are laying in bed with your tablet device, and it also is synced with your smart phone so you just start reading.
The advantages of this approach are:
1. When main device changes (in your example, the smartphone), all of your "docks" do not need to change.
2. High-power devices can stay high-power and low-power devices can stay low. Using your phone to edit high-def video would be murderous.
3. App and device manufacturers don't need to try and shoehorn their mobile OS and apps into a Desktop and vice versa.
4. Not everyone in your household needs to own a "main device", and all of your devices are available to use at the same time.
Disadvantages:
1. App and device manufacturers need to figure out a way to sync everything up.
2. Requires a network.
3. Individual devices may cost a bit more due to the need for a CPU in each.
In reality, I don't think the "brains" of a smart phone cost very much. I think far more cost is in the battery and screen. I think syncing is the way to go. It's a bit painful right now... even if you are 100% Apple not everything syncs. Google is great for keeping contacts, email, and calendars in sync. Firefox does a good job keeping browsers in sync. Amazon keeps all of your reading in sync. All of these companies are fighting for this space, and I don't really see many going for the route you envision.
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