Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change

<i>&#62;... Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, in a rare interview.<p>“We’re excited about the smartphone business,” said Mr. Woodside, who previously led Google’s sales and operations for the Americas.</i><p>Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary. (I think this is actually an important piece of information to confirm, since a good portion of subsidiaries <i>do</i> make strategic decisions for themselves)<p><i>&#62;In addition to the coming cuts, Google has gutted Motorola management, letting go 40 percent of its vice presidents.</i><p>Great move, I'd have much more confidence in Motorola's engineering staff than the (former) upper brass.<p><i>&#62;They will focus on Motorola’s storied past and the ways the products are better than the competition’s, like battery life. </i><p>Not too sure about this; every OEM on the face of the earth is utterly <i>obsessed</i> about battery life. I don't think any OEM can make battery life a differentiating feature. Every OEM presses all its suppliers and solutions providers for maximal power efficiency, and of course, said suppliers cross supply for many OEMs.

Got myself a Motorola Triumph last year, returned it within a week. The most awful Android phone I ever used. Nonexistent battery, missed taps (almost every 10 taps or so), GPS took about a minute or longer to latch on. Went back to a 3 year old Optimus V, slow as hell, but at least it works as intended.<p>Not buying a Motorola phone until there's major indication that they got their stuff together.

Can they just fire everyone who works on MotoBlur?

&#62; And, people familiar with the companies say, Google could decide to follow Apple's lead and build a phone from silicon to software, perhaps by creating a separate operating system for Motorola that other phone makers cannot use.<p>The only way I could see this happening (within the next few years) is if Google makes a Firefox OS-alike. They have way too much invested in Android to give it up so suddenly.

&#62;“It got left in the dust by the competition and kind of missed the smartphone transition,” said Charles S. Golvin, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research.<p>Motorola's Droid was the best smartphone available at the time of its release and sold tons. They didn't miss the transition, they fumbled.

I like the changes they're making. Post-merger integration is the most difficult part of a deal especially when you have significantly different cultures. I understand "integration" here isn't combining them into one operating company, it is the delivery of Google's vision of what Motorola can become, a vision Motorola thought was wrong prior to the deal (or they would have already been doing it).

This can actually only be a good thing. There's so many layers of management in motorola. Dealing with them is like a page form the script of brazil

Motorola is notorious for hiring and firing employees every year or two.

Those of you who are managers, can you tell me how it is possible to have a group which is "not afraid of failure" after 20% layoffs and with everybody wearing name badges with their expiration dates on them???