Motorola pledges turnaround, won't ride one phone into the ground again
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Sep 11th 2007 10:22AM
posted Sep 11th 2007 10:22AM
As the RAZR giveth, so shall it taketh away: what started out as one of the most successful cellphone lines in history -- a line that saw Moto's return to mobile dominance -- ended up being so played out with endless colors and variations that is was ultimately responsible for the company's subsequent slump, too. Ironic, yes, but it looks like the boys and girls out in Schaumburg took away an important lesson from the debacle, pledging at a recent analysts' meeting that they won't let the one-trick-pony syndrome bite again. No specific announcements were made at the meeting, but we can apparently expect the first of a wealth of new products to be unveiled "next month" (the U9, perhaps?) as CEO Ed Zander fights to keep his job and newly-installed mobile chief Stu Reed fights to make his mark. Moto still doesn't expect their handset division to be profitable until next year, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere.
I believe another issue is quality control. When the RAZR first came out, the quality and build was good. Now they are garbage and break even if you look at them wrong. Hopefully Motorola will improve on this.
actually india and china are the largest markets in the world. do your research, the fact n.america continues its use of the outdated cdma system is all a company needs to focus its attention on markets who want to be fully gsm. china as an example recently signed contracts with major manufacturers to produce gsm products and in return would change from cdma to gsm. the potential of this arrangement dwarfs anything n.america could possibly have asa potential.
Actually my RAZR (abut a year old) has had no problems while my friends with all early RAZRs have hated them and their problems
To Motorola,
I feel I must remind you that you are in fact an American Company. I offer this reminder to you as a simple partial solution to your current woes. You see, as an American company you have failed miserably to serve your greatest - or even most of your - wares to your home market instead opting to service a much smaller market in the form of South Korea and developing Asian countries. You also release highly desirable products to the Chinese market, and while it may be understandable to serve the Chinese market with unique products as it is an enormous and rapidly growing market, a partial compromise there would be to give China periods of exclusivity rather then complete exclusivity.
The reason I am confident a change in corporate mindset to releasing your diverse portfolio of mobile products in your home market would be an enormously large step towards changing the fortunes of your company is that you have an incredibly diverse product portfolio on the world market - South Korea in particular - rich with unique and interesting products in every popular form factor and product catagory.
Why spend untold billions of dollars on further market segregation when the turn around at GM in the automotive industry has shown that leveraging Global operations and product lines is the fastest and most cost effective way to quickly inject fresh and innovative products into declining markets.
I think it's even more amazing that ATT still offers the ORIGINAL V3 and advertises it. The least they could do is offer the V3r as the standard model.
I'd just like to be able to buy the phones I've read about on here! Like the z8 slider or even the RAzr2!