Motorola Chief Executive Ed Zander was baffled when he had just joined the world’s second biggest mobile phone maker and saw his company announcing cell phones that would not be in the shops until nine months later. “I was totally amazed. It was January 2004 and we were talking about products for the second half of the year,” Zander said in an interview on Wednesday.
Zander reckoned that since he was the new guy, and all of Motorola’s rivals were doing the same, he would keep quiet. But. “Last year, same thing,” he said. By now Zander was getting worried, because unlike its checquered past, Motorola
now had something to lose: competitive designs. It has had a runaway success with its ultra-thin RAZR model, and 12 months ago it announced a host of other breakthrough designs. They would take months to get into shops.
“I watched how the competition was copying all our products and that’s when Ron Garriques (Motorola’s handset chief) and I put our foot down,” he said.
From now on, Motorola will not announce products until the first models are delivered to customers, Zander said. “We announce when we ship.” He dismissed suggestions that Motorola was taking a cue from Apple whose
chief executive Steve Jobs often gets on stage to announce new products, like the iPod music player, and which are available in shops five minutes later. “All my life in the computer industry we announced when we shipped,” said Zander,
who joined Motorola over two years ago from computer maker Sun Microsystems .
Asian rivals like LG and Electronics have come out with their own cell phones that resemble the thin RAZR.
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[...] For those Q fans in the audience, we’ve got some good news (especially if you haven’t made the jump yet because that $200 price point is still a little high, or because you just can’t bear the thought of switching to Verizon). Apparently Ron Garriques, Moto’s Executive Vice President, Mobile Devices Business, told Bear Sterns that the Q’s sales performance can be compared to the steep, successful initial launch of the RAZR, and that they not only hope to drop the price to $50 after carrier subsidy by the end of 2006, but they’ll be launching a UMTS version when Verizon’s exclusivity contract on the device ends (as we’ve been expecting). Yeah, that’d be the same UMTS version that it was supposed to be around from the get go. Still, we’re assuming that exclusivity will last a good half year (quite literally a gadget lifetime to wait for us), after which time the UMTS Q will head to some mysterious, unknown network. Guess Ron wasn’t too firm a believer in Moto’s supposedly newly adopted announce-when-you-ship methodology, eh? [...]
- Posted by » Q fans, good news: it’ll cost $50 and have UMTS by 2007 | gadgets.portada.es, Tu Portada en InternetThe end result will be that people won’t hear of anything new from Motorola, and will think that the company stagnated. He should reduce the 9 months to 6, then to 3, and then to launch. It will take a year or two, but the company will not look stagnent.
- Posted by What is the Razr?