“Motorola fans who tuned in to the company’s first-quarter conference call had at least one unpleasant takeaway: There’s still no new phone to save the company from its post-Razr crisis,” Scott Moritz reports for The Street.com. “The Schaumburg, Ill., wireless tech titan lowered targets for the second quarter and promised to make additional cuts that it would explain more fully in June.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Motorola fans?” Bwahahahahaha!
“While Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPhone captures all the industry buzz, Motorola will be trying to patch up old mistakes like getting 3G devices to the market a year late and making phones for India that actually work with India’s languages,” Moritz reports. “As far as new phones for Motorola, expect a lot more um … well … revamped Razr lookalikes.”
“On the conference call with analysts, CEO Ed Zander was asked what was in store beyond the three design platforms the company offers. Zander said he expected to see a good reception for the Rizr, a slide-open version of the Razr,” Moritz reports. “But beyond that, Zander didn’t put much faith in the notion of a killer design. ‘I don’t know how many ways there are to make phones,’ Zander said on the conference call. ‘We have to be careful not to build things like Swiss army knives.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Now that’s real leadership failure. You should’ve spent more effort on PowerPC and less on crap phones with unintelligible user interfaces, Ed, you vapid, soon-to-be-ex CEO.
Moritz continues, “Referring to the iPhone though not naming Apple, Zander says its what’s in the phone as much as what it looks like that might be the key to success. ‘The brouhaha’ about the ‘West Coast’ phone ‘is what it can do,’ says Zander. ‘That’s were I have the team focused.’ But as one money manager pointed out, Motorola is going no where this year, so all they can offer is ‘spin.'”
MacDailyNews Note: Motorola posted a loss of $181 million for the first quarter as revenue from sales of its mobile devices slid 15 percent to $5.4 billion, MarketWatch reported Wednesday morning.
Full article here.
Oh, you’re going to see some “brouhaha,” Eddie. Guaranteed.
Who else finds it funny (or sad) that Motorola’s CEO is already to the point where he can’t even bring himself to utter to names “Apple” or “iPhone?”
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In the phone business the iPhone is going to kill Motorola.
They’ll have new phones. The Rezr, the Rozr, the Ruzr and for the occasional user, the Ryzr.
It never gets old…
“iPhone Bitch!”
Am i the first post??? I hope!!!
Anyway, I was a Big Big fan of the pebble for the whole design look and feel, i beleive the only thing letting them down, is there user interface. It is old and dated. It looks pixal picture from teletext the orignal.
Samsung at the moment has the leading interface in the industry til the iphone comes out.
And finally Macdailynews, you seem to like make comments about all companies disfortunes when we don’t know how the iphone is going to effect the market at the minute. Motorola is 2nd in mobile phone sales and til iphones becomes the top and a bigger seller that it is ur talking nonense, every company has its down evben apple with the latest delay of lepoard
my two cents
For those who don’t know, Motorola stuck by Apple and made their processors for many years. G3 and G4’s etc.
The Razr is a good device, it’s slim and fits in a pocket well, unlike the iPhone which will be like a iPod. Hard to carry and subject to being lost or dropped as it won’t fit in a pocket.
Motorola could have made more profit, but the phone buisness is all about the carriers thus the reason why Apple is getting a cut of AT&T’s monthly cash cow.
All these deals, Cisco, AT&T, EFI, the RIAA is scaring me, I’m going to sell APPL.
800-pound specter? Can ghosts weigh that much? Maybe it’s the return of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Payback Time!
Who would imagine that Apple would put Motorola in this situation?
They deserve this after all the screwups they made in the late 90’s early 00’s
“I’m going to sell APPL.”
Wise move. But that will surely disappoint the Appell Pete Corporation.
@Wiseguy…
uh.. the razr is a piece of crap. I’ve had two, and my wife had two. (both of us had to have them replaced free by verizon after less than 2 months use.)They batteries wear out in under six months, the phone drops calls when other phones on the same network in the same area don’t, and it’s UI is not user friendly. But if you want something that is slim and looks pretty, by all means… get a razr.
“We don’t know how the iphone is going to effect the market” but we do know how it’s affecting it now. From the effect it has already had and continues to have more than two months from reaching the market, it isn’t much of a stretch to assume that it’s affect will be to shake the foundations of companies like Motorola.
MDN Magic Word: analysis, as in: Even a cursory analysis of the situation shows Motorola to be in big trouble.
never mention your competitiors by name in an interview, it empowers them.
@Wiseguy
I agree with your premise that the iPhone will not really compete with Razr. But I don’t agree with your statement that the Razr is a good device. The software design is woeful. The menus are counter-intuitive, the predictive text is virtually unusable, it takes too long to boot (especially to get into the phonebook) and it plays stupid sounds when starting up or shutting down which are impossible to turn off.
My Razr is from Telstra and they load it with all their garbage. Until I got them to disable all the extra features I didnt want, i kept getting charged for web access every time I bumped one of the menu buttons by accident.
I don’t know if I need an iPhone. I bought the Razr because i thought it would just be a quick, simple, small phone. But I could not be more disappointed. So I think I will buy an iPhone just because I know Apple will ensure that it is a joy to use. Really, there is nothing worse than a piece of technology which annoys you every time you use it. And I have never hated a piece of technology more than this piece of junk.
When i get my iPhone I am going to have a ceremonial smashing of my Razr with a big sledgehammer. Perhaps I will get someone to video it and post it on the web…
Sticking by Apple would have to mean more than just selling them processors. Putting some serious effort into developing the PPC platform would have been a good example of sticking by them, but Motorola didn’t do that. In fact, they sold off the PPC division. That’s an example of abandoning Apple. Now they’re about to reap what they’ve sown.
Motorola used to make okay phones. Every one I’ve used in the past few years was okay… like the RAZR, but didn’t work very well. Crappy interface (they’re not alone there) and dicey functionality.
I bought my girlfriend a Jawbone Bluetooth headset to use with her RAZR. Cool, I thought. BUT, the phone drops the Bluetooth connections as fast as you set it up. Shut off the phone or recharge your headset and be prepared to re-pair the two! VERY annoying.
Funny, but another Motorola phone I had last year (forget model), did the same thing with 2 different brands of Bluetooth headset. I took it back to T-Mobile and got an unlocked Sony Ericsson.
Motorola should just concede the high-end and stick with making throwaway clamshell phones. UGH.
SydneyStephen,
I hate my Razr too, but I’ve always hated Windows more. I see products like the Razr as a direct result of Microsoft’s success. For more than two decades, everybody wanted to be like Microsoft. Now, many of the big corporations are. They pump out crap and expect us to buy it, then pay for the latest version of the crap because they’ve fixed a few of the problems that shouldn’t have been in the first version. The good news for Apple is that outside of IT departments people prefer products that work the way they’re supposed to.
some more reality surrounding the iPhone
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9022169&fsrc=RSS
Charles Schwab downgraded this stockand told me to dump it a year ago. iPhone is the least of their problems. If you can’t execute on your own strategy, it hardly matters what your competitors are doing. A shame really, because their phones seem to be among the best RF-wise – my V551 works many places my wife’s samsung phone does not.
Very good; very good. Facing defeat at the hands of iPhone you are!
Over that Phone Wars are…
Who cares about Motorola or Apple? We’re making a Zune-branded phone. A Zune Phone!
F*** Motorola and Apple. It’s Zune Phone, nigga!
You just got “showed”.
Motorola made the StarTac and the V70, landmarks of cell phone design and implementation. But, hmmm, that was a whiles ago, weren’t it…?
Now they are so fearful of the iPhone they won’t even try to copy it. It’s not necessarily the iPhone but the feature set that comes with it. They have alot to worry about, the iPhone will allow me to do the one thing I’ve been wanting to do on a phone Use the internet, I tried to get to ebay on my LG CU500 and “ran out of memory”.
Will the iPhone change the market? It already has, everything that has happened in the cell market is based on or compared to the iPhone. June can’t get here soon enough.
I’m not ready to throw the towel in on Moto (ok, I still have a little stock). They can still hold the bottom end phone business with Nokia, especially if they get off their asses and upgrade the interface.
My girlfriend has had a RAZR going on two years and has not had one problem. I know this may be an exception, and I warned her before she got it how delicate they can be, but she loves it, along with her iPod Nano and Fuji Z3.
They need to streamline their products, and FORGET about the niche area that Apple is about to do some slaughtering in.
And yeah, I’m sentimental about old radio companies.
“Motorola made the StarTac and the V70, landmarks of cell phone design and implementation. But, hmmm, that was a whiles ago, weren’t it…?”
The RAZR wasn’t a landmark of cell phone design and implementation?
Motorola has about 20 different designs that have reshaped the phone industry.
They will pull something out of the bag like they always do whenever people start to put “beleaguered” in front of their name.
Hello Moto!!
I wish you’d invest your two cents in English lessons and then you might make a few farthings profit.
Good! I hope it kills Motorola. They’re the same jackasses that could never figure out how to make a decent chip for the Mac.