Motorola Chief Executive Ed Zander, just after joining the the world’s second biggest mobile phone maker in 2004, said he was baffled by the company’s announcements for phones which would not be in the shops for nine months.

He reckoned that since he was the new guy, and all of Motorola’s rivals were doing the same, he would keep quiet. “Last year, same thing,” he said in an interview on Wednesday at the 3GSM trade show.
Yet he was getting worried. Motorola now had something to lose. It’s ultra-thin RAZR model had been a runaway success and it had just announced a host of other breakthrough designs, which 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.
“We announce when we ship,” Zander said. 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.