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Google Will Cut 1,200 More Jobs At Motorola Mobility
alphadogg writes "Motorola Mobility is cutting 1,200 staff, in addition to a reduction of 4,000 staff it announced in August, to focus on high-end devices. 'These cuts are a continuation of the reductions we announced last summer,' said Motorola. 'It's obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition.' Motorola's mobile business has been overwhelmed in the smartphone market by larger players such as Samsung Electronics, Apple, Sony, Huawei Technologies and ZTE."
That's what those workers deserved. I'm sure they were making more than some third world country worker would work for. They can all go out and start their own businesses.
The running charge for purchasing those patents must be getting too large to ignore.
Buying companies to gut them and fire the employees is not evil, otherwise Google would never do it.
Am I the only one that was hoping Google would take Motorola and do a complete 180 to start developing really awesome phones that aren't locked down? What are their plans for the company? I think Google is starting to turn evil, guys.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
I have the latest Motorola razr phone. It's friggen beautiful. Hard to believe they are cutting jobs.
starts become less fun. They bought Motorola not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't think of a decent alternative for competing with Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft. And with Motorola comes all kinds of financial, legal, environmental, supplier-related, inventory-related, and workforce-related problems that Google is not accustomed to having to deal with.
But they still have Google glass...
I imagine the plan all along was to gut the company - Google was just after the patents.
The partner companies were useful when Android needed to be established, but now they're in the way (similar to the situation Microsoft finds itself in now). Fortunately for Samsung, they are bigger than Google... but note that Samsung is pursuing alternatives.
#DeleteChrome
But the patents aren't all that great.
Part of the Moto deal being approved was that they can't use the patents aggressively and those patents are heavily encumbered with FRAND terms and even the H264 patents that Moto held are next worthless as evidenced withe recent agreement with MpegLA.
Google seem too have spent a lot of money for nothing of any value
You bought a cellphone manufacturer but then use other companies to make Nexus products, and those companies are unable to keep up with even the limited demand of the Nexus brand.
Then you are carrying on your back's a company that has been unable to offer a compelling product since the original Droid phone (which turned out to be a dismal phone).
How about axing Motorola and rebranding them as Nexus, period. Throw out anybody that made decision about Motorola phones for the last 10 years and hire some new innovative people to manage that division.
Honestly, sometimes it just seems like Google doesn't now how to run themselves in spite of billions in profit. The are succeeding in spite of themselves.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
by now the echoes in the buildings should have died down with all the cuts.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I think Google just wanted the patents so they couldn't be used against them and also to fend off attacks in the coming patent wars.
Aside from the 12 billion they spent on Motoral (and additional .5+ billion on losses since the acquisition), they also spent $2 billion on patents from IBM. All this for Android ($100 million or so?) which doesn't generate any profit on a pro-forma basis.
I never thought it possible, but Nokia is actually seeming more stable than a Google backed Motorola...
Doesn't anyone read their 10-K filings?
The recent ones pretty much say plain as day that the carriers are all pushing for higher ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) by driving up the cost of data plans which at the same time deemphasizing voice services. This basically means everyone wants to sell smart phones, and could care less about feature phones or voice-centric phones which are primarily being used for calls and/or text messages.
This has been in their 10-K filings with the SEC for the last 3 years that they have been headed this direction. It the same reason the European feature-phone and voice-centric phone manufacturers are also doing so terribly in most markets as higher speed data services are being rolled out: they are piss-poor vehicles for getting higher ARPU numbers when the cell phone market has basically come so close to saturation that many people are getting rid of their land lines in favor of cell phones (specifically, smart phones).
So this has basically been their plan of record for two years before Google got involved with them at all.
Yeah, Google gets a pretty good defensive patent portfolio out of it, but the Nortel portfolio that Apple, Microsoft, Rim. Sony,and Ericson got their grubby mitts on in July 2011 - 6,000 fairly important patents which cost them a combined $4.5B dollars. And unlike the Motorola, which are FRAND licensed to all comers, the Nortel patents are not.
The handset segment of Motorola's business has suffered for nearly a decade with very lackluster management, and had an excellent engineering staff (all those innovations and patents didn't just magically appear). Each successive management team took more and more money out of the company, culminating with the largest exporter of cash, Dr. Sanjay Jha.
Google. Under Dennis Woodside (an M&A lawyer, not a technologist), is not much different. In the last six months, they have let go the inventor of the most lucrative patent they have litigated against Apple, they have RIF'd their most prolific inventor, let go the design chief of the most popular and profitable smartphone design to date (not Jim Wicks, unfortunately). The Google CFO blames lackluster results on "an aging pipeline of products", and it takes "18 months to deliver new ones". Well, sorry folks.. it doesn't take 18 months, it takes 9...those products should be out by now...
Google is managing this subsidiary like it's a internet software company, and then following the Apple-Samsung strategy of doing fewer designs (when apple and Samsung are now branching out, and doing more). The wrong HR strategy, the wrong market strategy, and the wrong outside management, it is no small wonder the remaining technology talent are leaving in droves. The only difference between MMI and the Titanic? The Titanic, at least, had a band.
They don't have to be great. There just has to be enough of them to so that anybody that threatens to sue Google for patent infringement can be counter-threatened with 10,000 billable man-years of legal work to prove that the other company isn't infringing on Google's patents (i.e. they can be used defensively). A portfolio like that can also be used for shakedowns of smaller companies:
Big Company: Nice little business you've got here. Hate to see it fail due to you failing to pay any patent royalties you owe us.
Small Company: But we don't infringe on any of your patents, and we can prove it too.
Big Company: How many billable hours for you to prove you don't infringe on any of our 10,000 patents?
Small Company: That's extortion!
Big Company: Such an ugly name for a business proposition. Just pay the protection money and we'll call off our lawyers.
That's not some far fetched scenario. I worked for a small company that was shaken down like that, and we wound up paying the protection money just to stay in business. It's not just patent trolls that do it. This was a larger company (who's name I'll avoid mentioning) that had actual products and stuff. It's just a sideline. It's well known that IBM did that to Sun in its early days. AFAIK Google hasn't done it, but it's always a possible sideline.
should learn from Google on how to cut people.
New Economic Perspectives
Google is to Motorola as an excited six-year-old is to a box of cereal with a prize inside: Moto's patent portfolio was the only part Google cared about. They rest of the company is filler, except to the extent that it generates more patents.
Motorola is also notorious in the phone rooting community for being one of the most painful to work with. Anyone including that as criteria when considering a new phone immediately discounts them.
Google bought Motorola because of Patent trolling by Microsoft / Apple. They don't want Motorola to dominate the industry because it's more important for Google to have everybody using Android than Motorola grow. I get the feeling that the Nexus line being thrown to other companies was all about promoting trust despite owning one of the industry's big players, and it's worked.
Compare that to the industry's stance on the Microsoft Surface.... Dell/HP are pissed as hell. Dell is openly selling Android tablets side-by-side with their Windows tablets.
BTW: I have a Razr Maxx HD and I LOVE it. Nice bright screen, fast, great reception, great sound quality...
But there's nothing like waking up in the morning, realizing that you forgot to plug in the phone last night but it doesn't really matter because you still have more than 3/4 battery life left from the previous day. It's a much more liberating feeling than I would have expected. It doesn't let me down, even when I fly Coast-to-Coast red-eye watching movies the entire way at the end of a long work day.
Woah!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If not 'creepy'.. something. I am assuming the person is trying to sell software or something, but is coming across like the cube world guy.
Romney did give you a chance, but guess what, somebody did not take him on his offer.
"It's obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition."
Helping them == Walking with them to the car in the parking lot.
GTFO!!!
They don't have to be great. There just has to be enough of them to so that anybody that threatens to sue Google for patent infringement can be counter-threatened with 10,000 billable man-years of legal work to prove that the other company isn't infringing on Google's patents (i.e. they can be used defensively). A portfolio like that can also be used for shakedowns of smaller companies:
Big Company: Nice little business you've got here. Hate to see it fail due to you failing to pay any patent royalties you owe us.
Small Company: But we don't infringe on any of your patents, and we can prove it too.
Big Company: How many billable hours for you to prove you don't infringe on any of our 10,000 patents?
Small Company: That's extortion!
Big Company: Such an ugly name for a business proposition. Just pay the protection money and we'll call off our lawyers.
That's not some far fetched scenario. I worked for a small company that was shaken down like that, and we wound up paying the protection money just to stay in business. It's not just patent trolls that do it. This was a larger company (who's name I'll avoid mentioning) that had actual products and stuff. It's just a sideline. It's well known that IBM did that to Sun in its early days. AFAIK Google hasn't done it, but it's always a possible sideline.
s/Big Company/Google/g
Back when the acquisition happened everybody pointed out that this was all about the patent. Google know has enough patent to play the unwinnable global thermonuclear mobile phone patent war and that is sufficient to keep all the "honest" players mostly honest...
Probably that the ones the employees they still have are the ones filling patents ; )
Eventually there will be NO Motorola employees.
The last guy will come to the conclusion that he will have to fire himself.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
There's a whitehouse petition online now to try to curb H1B abuses. Maybe if it wasn't so easy to bring in cheap labor, companies like Google and Motorola might treat their people a little better: http://wh.gov/7BqR
They didn't have to buy the division to get that. They could have negotiated an agreement that would accomplish the same thing.
they probably also wanted an insurance policy incase android started to get eaten by other OSs or manipulated into being android in name only.
Samsung and the others are being good about not fucking up android too much. if anything ever happens, motorola will be there.