Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

>... 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.

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