A case of the recession bites or just a clever strategy? Who knows - but either way, Motorola says it's not going to release as many handsets this year as it has in the past.
Still counting the pennies earned from its flagship Motorola Droid RAZR device, the firm - which is in the process of becoming part of Google - says it wants to concentrate on spending its marketing budget wisely.
That means, one assumes, fewer devices with huger advertising campaigns when they do come to market. Could also be something to do with the fact that there's less cash to spend since Moto admitted its fourth quarter sales will be less than analysts have predicted.
Maybe it's also a dig at HTC or BlackBerry which seems to pop handsets out willy nilly right now, but the big boss, CEO Sanjay Jha had this to say on the matter:
“A lot of products that are roughly the same doesn’t drive the market to a new place”... “I made this decision independent of what the others will do,” he said. “We’re doing what we think is the right thing.”
Interesting - considering just a few years ago, Motorola was one of the protagonists of market over saturation, rereleasing the runaway success V3 RAZR model in every colour under the sun, before repackaging and flogging the same horse until it was no so much dead, but carved into pieces by the whip.
Jha also had an admission that the Motorola Atrix - which Moto itself claimed in an advertising campaign last year was the most advanced handset on the market - wasn't necessarily as successful as it could have been.
The idea of a handset that plugged into a 'lap-dock' wowed the industry at launch - but closer use and inspection revealed it not to be as handy as it could be with a design that didn't even let users open the screen at full tilt. And that's before you get to the fact that to buy all the accessories would have required more money than the GDP of some small nations.
Oh well - best to look to the future. It's quality, not quantity, eh?
Via AllthingsD
