Motorola Back On Track

In 1990, Motorola dominated the cell phone business. In the mid-1990s and late 1990s Motorola faced stiff competition from Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Lucky Goldstar (which became LG), Kyocera, and NEC. However, Motorola was able to prevail more often than not. However, what Motorola did not face was China; until now. In fact none of the aforementioned vendors had to really deal with the Chinese as...

The V3 was something that was a victim to fortune. Motorola built a very sexy looking handset they just forgot to do something with the software.  So you got a large number of users who discover that this is not a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson and you need to read the instruction book. Life is too short for instruction books, and so people became unhappy that this was a phone that just made calls...

Over the long-term (five years and out), the low-cost Asian phone manufacturers are becoming more competitive with features and low cost, making it diffult for the large vendors to sustain their R&D in the US or Europe.  In the short run, the Asian manufactures are still more focused on the low to medium end phones as they grow their R&D capabilities for high end phones such as smart...

Razr2 is a nice update to the aging Razr, but Motorola needs a lot more than that for salvation. Nokia and Samsung are moving ahead of Motorola, and this will be only a brief respite unless Motorola changes their business model.