Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change | Hacker News Reader

Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change

nytimes.com

70 pointsmjfern34 comments

>... Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, in a rare interview.

“We’re excited about the smartphone business,” said Mr. Woodside, who previously led Google’s sales and operations for the Americas.

Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary. (I think this is actually an important piece of information to confirm, since a good portion of subsidiaries do make strategic decisions for themselves)

>In addition to the coming cuts, Google has gutted Motorola management, letting go 40 percent of its vice presidents.

Great move, I'd have much more confidence in Motorola's engineering staff than the (former) upper brass.

>They will focus on Motorola’s storied past and the ways the products are better than the competition’s, like battery life.

Not too sure about this; every OEM on the face of the earth is utterly obsessed about battery life. I don't think any OEM can make battery life a differentiating feature. Every OEM presses all its suppliers and solutions providers for maximal power efficiency, and of course, said suppliers cross supply for many OEMs.

I don't agree with your logic of Sales/Ops guy -> "all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary".

Dennis Woodside is a very respected and capable executive at Google. He's the kind of guy that would have probably left Google for his own CEO gig if the Motorola opportunity hadn't come available. Just because he came from the Sales org internally doesn't mean that he somehow won't have the autonomy to make strategic decisions!

Android manufacturers have been obsessed at the high end with big screens and thinness, both of which come at the expense of battery life.

Truly agree about the battery life. It the one thing that defines a mobile device, be it a phone, a pocket calculator, a language translator etc. Motorola would need to improve it by a couple orders of magnitude for it become a game changer. Imagine having a mobile phone that only needs to be charged once a fortnight!

You mean smartphone. My old Nokia 1200 did have two weeks battery time.

-> Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary.

This absolutely does not follow. Woodside is a senior trusted Google executive.

Edit: Removed absent-minded italics tags.

>I don't think any OEM can make battery life a differentiating feature.

Maybe not long term, but I think it's doable in the short term. The trend in smart phones the past few years has been that form factor drives the design. As phones get thinner and thinner, there's just plain less room for a high capacity battery.

Moto's current line up actually features both extremes here: the RAZR is the obsession with thinness, while the RAZR MAXX takes the same basic phone, and concedes size to stuffing it with a huge battery.

The MAXX seems to have been fairly well received, so Moto might dip their toes a bit deeper into these waters.

Got myself a Motorola Triumph last year, returned it within a week. The most awful Android phone I ever used. Nonexistent battery, missed taps (almost every 10 taps or so), GPS took about a minute or longer to latch on. Went back to a 3 year old Optimus V, slow as hell, but at least it works as intended.

Not buying a Motorola phone until there's major indication that they got their stuff together.

Can they just fire everyone who works on MotoBlur?

I'd attribute that fiasco to management, not necessary the unfortunate employees forced to implement such a terrible idea.

Of course. I was 98% joking.

I would just fire everyone that ever got close to that thing just in case

Ok, management told them to drive off a cliff, then they went and did exactly that.

...so you're telling me if you were asked by your boss to implement a software feature you didn't like you'd leave your job on principle? Most people don't have that luxury. Sure, you can moan about it, but sometimes you have to suck it up.

Not a feature that I didn't like, but something that's obviously a train wreck.

I've ended in situations like that, but then boss saw it was unsustainable and a major overhaul was needed.

But if the company only goes for actively making the user experience crap for nothing I would consider moving

I think they did -- the last(/only) Motorola phone I had (the Photon) barely had any MotoBlurryness. Other than the theme being Froyo-esque on a Gingerbread phone and some shiny buttons here and there, it felt really close to AOSP. And this was before the Google acquisition.

> And, people familiar with the companies say, Google could decide to follow Apple's lead and build a phone from silicon to software, perhaps by creating a separate operating system for Motorola that other phone makers cannot use.

The only way I could see this happening (within the next few years) is if Google makes a Firefox OS-alike. They have way too much invested in Android to give it up so suddenly.

> The only way I could see this happening (within the next few years) is if Google makes a Firefox OS-alike.

Hmm... it could be designed for the web from the ground up, and they could call it Chrome OS! ;P

(edit: I know what you mean, but considering how much the design of Boot to Gecko seems to have been inspired by Chrome OS, I found your comment somewhat funny.)

Yeah, I thought about that, but (A) the big draw of a mobile OS is its apps now, and Google hasn't really done anything with the Chrome Web Store in the mobile direction yet (note its absence on Chrome for Android), and (B) I was typing on a phone :)

Just make the next Android OS Motorola exclusive for 6 months, and then Open Source it... They just have to balance between what they want to do and their OEM partners.

I think that's too drastic of a move, and would severely alienate partners, especially since Google has cultivated strong relationships with OEMs via their GED programs.

A more sensible differentiating move would be to simply strive for a better user experience and more seamless HW/SW integration in their MOT phones by leveraging their deeper understanding of the OS and the framework.

They only have to do these two things - Build more reliable hardware - provide stock android on all Motorola phones

That would make more people want to have a Motorola phone.

What does it matter if Google alienate's there partners, where are they going to go? They need Android more than Google needs them.

Vanilla Android.

How many manufacturers ship with just vanilla Android, completely unlocked?

That alone would make a good bullet point, even if someone does have worthwhile additions.

Great bullet point for very limited market. You'd target more people with dedicated facebook button.

Vanilla Jelly Bean is an absolutely massive improvement over the experience of almost all OEM skins.

I don't think someone has to be an idealist or a geek to appreciate that difference.

It's a smart move to target the people who are often turned to by family members and friends for advice on buying smart phones.

>“It got left in the dust by the competition and kind of missed the smartphone transition,” said Charles S. Golvin, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research.

Motorola's Droid was the best smartphone available at the time of its release and sold tons. They didn't miss the transition, they fumbled.

As an original Droid owner, the Droid was a great phone.

Tying the phone to a brand name owned by Verizon was probably a bad idea, all things considered, causing considerable confusion among mainstream non-techies as to what they should upgrade to post "OG" Droid. And then they also kneecapped the techie market by switching to locked bootloaders (they've since recanted on this, but I still view the Motorola brand negatively solely because of what they did with locked bootloaders in the past).

I like the changes they're making. Post-merger integration is the most difficult part of a deal especially when you have significantly different cultures. I understand "integration" here isn't combining them into one operating company, it is the delivery of Google's vision of what Motorola can become, a vision Motorola thought was wrong prior to the deal (or they would have already been doing it).

This can actually only be a good thing. There's so many layers of management in motorola. Dealing with them is like a page form the script of brazil

Motorola is notorious for hiring and firing employees every year or two.

Let's just hope they fire the right ones this time. ;-)

Agreed, it's almost like a public union -- where the ones who deserve to be fired are the last to go.

Those of you who are managers, can you tell me how it is possible to have a group which is "not afraid of failure" after 20% layoffs and with everybody wearing name badges with their expiration dates on them???

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