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The Motorola Train Wreck

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by Kevin Maney
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Oct 30 2008 7:07pm EDT

The Motorola Train Wreck

Kevin Maney writes: Motorola's news keeps going from bad to worse. The company announced a $397 million loss and 3,000 more job cuts as sales fell 15%.


The once-great company has been unraveling the past couple of years, as I detailed in a story for Portfolio. The new executive team of Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha was supposed to turn around the cell phone division and eventually split it off from the rest of Moto, but things have only deteriorated under the co-CEOs and the split is nowhere in sight.

Interesting, in his comments about the cell phone division, that Jha talked about how Motorola designers have focused too much on making "bright shiny objects" and instead need to make devices that work easily. While working on my Moto story, several sources noted that the iPhone has helped usher in an era in mobile devices that plays against Motorola's culture. Moto is a good hardware engineering company. It's a terrible software company. Until recently, the pizzaz in cell phones was all about hardware -- making them smaller and cooler-looking. But post-iPhone, the pizzaz is in what a device's software can do. That's the big lesson of the iPhone App Store.


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