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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.
Nokia destroyed low end for other players in global scale..
cheapest nokias are so cheap it's very hard to compete there. note that this was happening all last decade, siemens got ran to the ground.. sammys featurephones were in trouble most of the time. Motorola had an one off hit with the razr but that was their high point in featurephones.
if you can buy a 101 for twenty-thirty euros.. what's there to compete? it's a supply and least parts necessary game. it's still a big business though.
but you know what's funny? the smartphones we have today into which nobody has found any good features in couple of last years to tack on will be hundred bucks in couple of years. they're gonna have to come up with some really good gimmicks for the high end if they intend there to be a high end high margin market at all then.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, and who wants one of those new Core i5 laptops, either. I want the good old days of a 386 with Windows 3.1!
GET OFF MY LAWN
Which is why I switched to a Nexus...pray tell, WHY does Moto not wanting me running a custom kernel that's not old and full of holes? I don't know, but the Droid2 was and will always be my last Moto phone until this changes.
so you want a smartphone, that cant browse the web or install apps. this is a terrible idea.
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.
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.
Easy: https://www.snapfon.com/index.php
A couple clients who are higher up in MMI told me about this just before the google buyout. I guess I can say something now?
This has been planned from the get-go, and it will weed out some inefficiency and bring in more of the "Google Culture" and clear out what most know is by-now pretty broken model at Motorola. On the whole, it sounds like a LOT of people are happy about this (from what I've heard). The people leaving will get some pretty good buyout packages, if I understand it right.
So, no need to panic. I'm interested in hearing other opinions, though.
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Smartphones are not useless toys by any means. If you think that then I'm afraid your century has gone.
"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.
You call this dumb phone? Seriously? QWERTY is for texting; MP3/Ogg is for music listening; a camera for picture. To me a dumb phone is telephone that makes voice call and maybe a call display.
Good-bye Moto
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Karnal
that's still way too much unecessary crap. camera, mp3 player, sd-card slot, custom ring tones? you're confused, sonny boy, this is a god-dammned phone! keyboard for texting ok, because writing a sentence is better than wasting time yapping.no graphics at all are needed, a 4x25 line text display is plenty
That is what Motorola makes
No, that's what Motorola MADE. I have one and love it, great camera/video, keyboard, internet, email, ms pac man, qwerty keyboard, all in a phone that fits in my pants pocket. Exactly what I need. However, it's broken, and I can't get a replacement. I'll have to drive 100 miles to St Louis to get it repaired :(
Free Martian Whores!
I don't know about him but MY netbook weighs less than 3 pounds, has a dual core with 8Gb of RAM so all my programs are loaded into RAM and ready to go, has a class 10 SDHC always loaded for Readyboost so that any access to the 320Gb HDD is sped up by having small I/Os come from the SDHC, gets nearly 7 hours playing 720p on a 12 inch screen that is actually enjoyable to watch instead of eyestrain-o-zision, and WiFi is everywhere here so I always have service.
So I'm with him, kinda stupid to spend $500+ on a smartphone or get assraped for 2 years on a plan when I already have a netbook with more of everything than any smartphone. Oh and while everyone else plays Angry Birds I can play L4D and GTA:VC, although I learned not to play GTA or Saints Row in the doctor's office thanks to all the backseat drivers. I swear if I hear one more time "The cops are gaining! You better get to a safe house!" I'm gonna smack somebody.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.