Motorola Cans Another 2,600 Employees

the razor they thought they would just sit on that while others updated to better phones with features.

...preparing for a spinoff or sale.

They would sell more handsets if they didn't make such garbage.

Amen. I gave Moto two chances recently, based on their phones from back in the "good ole days", hoping to get that same quality. Boy, was that a mistake. Goodbye Moto.

Same here. I didn't want a MOTO for my upgrade, since it lacked features. I went with another NON-MOTO brand. But then, I had a change of heart, and thought I'd give MOTO a try. That was a mistake. So, switched back to the NON-MOTO. I keep the MOTO as a backup only.

a time when motorola's handsets were world class. To have one would mean you were somebody...I guess the RAZR was the last big thing, and from there it went down hill. I guess the product naming team was the first to go, with creative hits such as the PBELFONE(omg what?) , KRZR, RIZR, ROKR, SLVR, SCPL, the list goes on.

Oh well.

I overhead a conversation between my wife, her sister and her best friend. The latter had both had RAZRs and complained of how prone it was to damage. They decided that it was really poor quality and that they would never buy another moto. My wife heard this and decided the same.

`Women` are a powerful market.... just look at the Honda Civic brand and what it did to domestic car manufacturers. Now if they change their collective mind..... well I wouldn't want to be on their shitlist.

Yes, they are less likely to dink around with something that doesn't work.

ALL Nextel Phones are made by Motorola if Motorola leaves the handset market then whats going to happen to Nextel whos going to take over making their iDEN phones?

The way things are going over at sprint, you wont have to worry about that for much longer either

I bet Samsung could make a smaller and thinner iDEN phone then motorola could ever do.

Why would Samsung want any part of a dying market on a dying provider?

why would people say they think Samsung would by the mobile devision of Motorola?

by? Don't know.

Buy? Motorola makes a lot of phones, but the company is in the shit right now and they are shedding unprofitable divisions. Part of the problem are things like iDen phones. Samsung may be interested in other parts of the division.

Or monkeys may be running the trade press.

Any one of those is as probable as the others.

you don't think iDen is profitable? I left Nextel because I got fed up with system busy messages maybe about 5 times a month.

The only thing decent was the PTT but sometimes I was unable to get the person who I was trying to reach.

Well, I'll let the market stats and Sprint/Nextel's condition speak for themselves.

yeah I understand but I don't know seems like they are just trying to keep Nextel's head above water.

And I guess no news is good news...

Actually the problems at Sprint with their horrific management of the Nextel iDEN system are part of the problems at Motorola. iDEN was a huge profit area for Motorola, and helped subsidize other areas of the company. With Sprint driving off customers faster than rats jumping off a sinking ship, it has really made a bad situation far worse at the big /\/\. What has been interesting is Sprint's new CEO, Dan Hesse, has been talking up iDEN quite a bit. They put a bunch of the older handsets back for sale, slashed the crap out of the iDEN phone prices, etc etc. In wireless, however, coverage and voice quality are king. Sprint has a long way to go on that.

Anyway, there's still lots of money to be made in iDEN, Nextel International (NII Holdings) is growing like gangbusters in South America. Given proper network management, new handsets, and good customer service, iDEN in the US will reverse trend too. Sprint hasn't delivered on any of that yet, though.

Sprint is already asking the FCC to let them do something else withe IDEN spectrum.

No, they're not. They're asking the FCC to give them more time for the rebanding effort.

You are correct but Sprint can no longer afford the rebanding effort while losing IDEN customers in droves.

Now all those people can find jobs they enjoy instead of making handsets all day.

If they actually spent money making a better ui for their phones instead of continuing the razr in 500 different colors
they wouldn't be at this point.

Motorola may have invented the wireless phone at some point (largely due to inspiration of the communicator from Star Trek, so the story goes), but the Razr stopped being trendy, and they've not had a standout success since. They may've come out with the ROKR, but that thing was so bad that Apple went into the mobile phone business with the iPhone to fix all the problems the ROKR had.

Motorola design isn't exactly famous for a lot of (good) things. Yes, the latest iterations of the RAZR are good, but look how long it took to get to where they could be reliable. Can't have been too long ago when the RAZR was considered an epic piece of *expletive* for reception and call quality.

And Motorola has some laughably bad reputation for battery life. Even now, right after a fresh charge, my h505 bluetooth headset (not much more than a couple of months old now) will start going into beeeping fits about low battery. And you can't even get half your battery life on any of their phones after a year's worth of usage.

Consumers don't want to pay $400+ for handsets with technology /features that are 5 years old?

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stated reason was: trolling

A sizable portion of the 2,600 lost jobs will come from Singapore, where the company is planning to halt cell phone manufacturing by the end of this year. Most are overseas including England. At least the majority of the job losses are not in the US. Which is what some companies rather do. Cut US jobs and keep overseas because they are cheaper.

There are some good people at the Plantation, Florida office. I've talked to a few myself that would agree with some of the comments here.

What? Motorola is still around? Didn't it make clunky vacuum tube TVs or something? Why hasn't it died yet, like RCA and Zenith?

RCA is part of Thompson SA
Zenith is part of LG Electronics.

Zombies walk among us.

Just because Moto's cell division isn't doing good, doesn't mean the company isn't doing good. They still hold quite large contracts for the government, which is banking them quite a bit money.

Very true. Most of the non-handset businesses will be happy when the handset business is shed. It's poor performance was affecting bonuses of the people in the non-handset businesses.

They have other divisions that are doing fairly well.

M owns spectrum for private radio use.
M makes law enforcement radio gear which is high margin
Recently bought Netopia, not a cash king, but has great channel with telecoms
M owns Good Software, decent software for phone sync

M is a great engineering company that has struggled making competitive mass market devices.

Still owns a part of Freescale, the joint venture with IBM that makes Power CPU's and other discrete microelectronics.

While handsets are a big loss, it is nowhere near what they lost trying to develop Windows NT for PowerPC. Iridium was a large loss but that was syndicated amongst bondholders.

You have to give them credit, they take risks, its just that they have lost too much on each one lately.

Freescale wasn't a joint venture with IBM. It was the old semiconductor division that was spun off.

When I was there, we all acknowledged and knew that Mot was never good in commodity businesses. Handsets have overall become commodity items now.