Motorola is one of America’s proudest brands. Started by the brothers Galvin in Chicago in 1928 as a battery company, it moved to manufacturing car radios, hence the name; a combination of “motor” and “Victrola.” In 1943 the company went public, after producing the first walkie-talkie for the military and all kinds of cellular infrastructure that made possible the cell phone of today. Beginning in 1958, it developed two-way radios for NASA space flights, allowing Mission Control to communicate with astronaut Neil Armstrong as he stepped on the moon in 1969. It began manufacturing televisions in 1947 developing the first truly rectangular color TV, a business it later sold to Panasonic.
In 1983, it came out with the first
commercial cell phone, a DynaTAC 8000X. Along the way, it also invented Six
Sigma, a quality improvement process Jack Welch at GE made famous. Over the
years we are satisfied with the technology and build quality offered in
products and remember they were the pioneers in introducing six sigma concepts
to the world. They were the market leaders in setup boxes, modems, DVR,
Semiconductors and Mobile phones for a long time.Motorola launched basic phones
and entered the Indian Smartphone market as early as 2000 when Nokia was the
market leader with Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Siemens, Ericsson
as the other competitors.
Nothing is sadder than the tale of
what happened to the RAZR. This amazingly thin, handsome clamshell phone was
developed by Motorola in July 2003 and introduced a year later. when Geoffrey
Frost, Motorola’s marketing chief, who unfortunately died two years later at
age 56, planned and executed the “Hello Moto” campaign that launched this
product, and was around long enough to see it sell 110 million units worldwide,
boosting Motorola for a time to second only to Nokia in handheld phones. Till
2006 they ruled the market with minimum market share by launching extra
ordinary phones like Moto RAZR, Pebble etc. But unlike the Koreans companies,
Motorola didn’t embrace the Android OS and between 2009-12 they launched Smartphones
under the familiar names of RAZR, Defy and Droid and at the same time they
continued to lose the market share from 2011.
Suddenly Google acquired Motorola
to compete with Apple and Microsoft followed the strategy by acquiring Nokia. But
critics said that Google acquired Motorola mainly for their patents.
Expectations among spectators raised and Motorola released their first phone
under Google shadow name X on August 2013 offering variety of customization.
The boxes are engraved with the stickers naming “Motorola- A Google Company”.
The launch of Motorola X which carries high-end specs with low price tags
created confusion among Nexus fans. People said Google will shutdown Nexus
division and may continue Motorola devices in future. Thus Moto X started to
create internal competition between Google devices.
In yet another step, Motorola
launched a Moto G, a 12000 bucks phone and was met with huge success all over
the world. Especially in India when it was launched through Indian e-commerce
site Flipkart, it sold out like hotcakes. A few days later Moto X too hit the
Indian market with a killer price tag.By the success of these two
models, they launched Moto E at 7200 bucks and had an overwhelming
response in India. While it revived company’s fortunes it dealt a huge blow to
the Indian brands like Micromax, Lava, Karbonn, Wickedleaks and
Spice.
On January 2014 Google announced
that Motorola is acquired by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo (Wait whaaat!!?) . This created a huge confusion among
Motorola fans and the reason was unknown. This clarifies one thing that Nexus
devices are safe (*phew!*). After the acquisition of Lenovo, Motorola has not launched
any model till now but still boxes come with “Motorola a Google company” tag.
One interesting fact is the difference between the screen sizes in three
devices E, G, X are 0.2 inches and priced around multiples of 7K.
Motorola once again started regaining their
market position all over the world by launching perfect models in competitive
price tag. But current Smartphone market is filled with huge vendors and it is
stiff to compete with other local & international brands. In a way the
trend-setting internet giant (Google of course!) has managed to
resurrect one of the iconic American brands, now can the Chinese build on it?
Let’s wait and watch.
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