“Dell Inc. hired Motorola Inc.’s Ron Garriques to run its consumer business, the second appointment this week as founder Michael Dell seeks to revive sales,” Connie Guglielmo reports for Bloomberg. “Garriques, an executive vice president who led Motorola’s mobile-phone business, will start Feb. 19 at the world’s second- largest personal-computer company, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said in a statement today.”
“For Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Illinois, the defection steps up pressure on Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander. Profit margins have been eroded by competition from low-priced handsets, the stock dropped 14 percent in the past year, and billionaire shareholder activist Carl Icahn is pressing for a bigger buyback,” Guglielmo reports. “Dell shares rose 1 cent to $24.39 at 4 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading.”
MacDailyNews Take: Wow. Garriques sure can move the market.
Guglielmo continues, “One of Garriques’s first challenges may be to redesign the products, analysts said. At Motorola, he helped create and sell the half-inch-thick, all-metal Razr, a fresh design that won the handset maker customers from Nokia Oyj. Mobile devices account for two-thirds of Motorola’s revenue. Dell’s products are ‘homely,’ said Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co. Inc. in New York.”
“For Motorola, Garriques’s defection leaves Zander with a hole in the top ranks just as he’s looking for another product to replicate the success of the Razr, which has been on the market for two years,” Guglielmo reports. “Motorola has a history of getting into trouble when its top team gets smaller, said James Post a management professor at Boston University. ‘This is another hollowing-out of Motorola’s senior management team at time when the company faces stiff competition,’ Post said.”
Full article here.
When you flee one sinking ship is it wise to hop aboard another sinking ship? Perhaps if you think it’ll take a little longer to sink, it’s better than the alternative, we guess.
It doesn’t matter if Dell hires Jonathan Ive to design their boxes. It’s the OS, stupid.
Dell offers nothing unique and no pretty cases are ever going to be able to cover up that fact. And Garriques is a communications product line manager with an electrical engineering background, not a designer. Maybe Mikey plans to take on Apple’s iPhone with a Dell DJ Phone? That went so well last time, he’s probably all excited to ramp up.
What would we do if we ran Dell? We’re so glad you asked. After begging Steve Jobs to license us Mac OS X and being mocked or just plain ignored, well, we’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
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Actually rather fitting.. since RAZR phones had pretty cases but an aweful interface and software, seems like a perfect fit.
I can’t believe the media is crediting Garriques as the guy behind the RAZR. He barely had anything to do with it (other than running the design into the ground for about one year too long).
twilightmoon,
You’re so right about the Razr! It looks sleek, but using it is just as bad as any other cell phone I’ve ever used. The keypad looks good too, but it’s easy to hit the wrong buttons. The motorola bluetooth headset (customer service replaced it several times) I bought for it sent out a garbled voice, making it unusable. The Plantronics headset I got next works great, but the phone has a bad habit of dropping the connection at random times!
The Razr is driving me to anxious anticipation of the iPhone’s arrival. I’ve never been one to wait in line to buy a specific item, especially at its debut, but if they drop the price to anywhere near what this rumor indicates, I’ll probably find myself camping out for one.
Uh, the price reference was to the other rumor:
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/12657/
No doubt the iPhone WILL sell at that price, but I can promise you it won’t debut at that price.
There’s no REASON for Apple to sell at such a bargain basement price given the amount of pent up demand for the thing. If you could sell your house for 5 million dollars, would you sell it for 1 million just to sell it a little bit faster?
No? I didn’t think so. The iPhone will sell for 499 and 599 when it comes out WITH a 2 year contract just as Steve Jobs said.
You want it cheaper, you’re going to be waiting a few years.
lol how long is a development cycle again? 12months? What are they going to do in the meantime?
How on earth could a redesign of a cheap plastic case take 12 months?
Size and weightwise the Razr is great, but I agree with you guys that the interface is crap.
For a while I thought it was me having problems with my new phone, but I realize now that most functions make no sense.
Example in point – somehow the speeddial #’s got messed up putting random contacts inplace of my frequent ones I had programmed. I found I couldn’t delete the speeddial, but could only reassign to another number. Took me 30 minutes to set everything right again.
Wow, 30 whole minutes to fix your numbers.
Big friggin’ deal.
Go buy an iPhone, then. You’re too stupid to use a real smart phone.
Thanks, “Motorola”:
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As an AAPL share holder I applaud your customer relations.
Fsck you all if you’re too stupid to use our phones.
Go buy your beloved Apple iPhones instead. We don’t want retards for customers.
@ Motorola – i’m with you dude Motorola are the bomb, what model hve you got ?
Hey, give Dell some credit-at least their boxes look better than Alienware.
I’d like the lipstick concession for that!
Dell is so smart!
DO NOT hire the people who do the actual DESIGN & development work, hire the project manager… just to be sure all the paperwork is in order.
Dell’s margins are so RAZR thin, how on earth can they afford this superficial expense?
Way to go (down the tubes) Dell! Go Beige!
I will say this, RAZR phones are about the most elegantly designed phones to date. That is, until the iPhone came along. Dells are pretty freaking ugly. I remember back in the 90s when Acer introduced the ASPIRE with a case designed by FROG DESIGN. It was way ahead of its time, but nothing has come along since in the PC real, except for maybe a few Sony desktops. The PC industry just doesn’t care. You have all these beautiful boom boxes, stereos, receivers, DVD players, but Windows PCs just stay BUTT UGLY. They have to blend with the elegance of electronics and look good in any room. Apple knows that. And so do we.
A lot of us who work at Motorola are glad he’s gone.
Listen, for short it’s SIDAGTMBTOTS. I’m tired of reading the full version.
Actually, in Dell’s case, that should be: “Shut the company down and give the money back to the suckers, er, customers.”