Still no platform for Motorola?
Techcrunch.com had a story yesterday about how Motorola is going full throttle with Android. According to the article, Motorola currently has about 50 developers on its Android team, but expects to grow the team to some 350 developers.
The story immediately reminded me of some comments Russell Beattie posted on Motorola about a year ago. Beattie noted how Motorola seemed to release handsets with every conceivable OS there is, and went on to attribute Motorola's market share decline to lack of platform focus. The numbers certainly speak for themselves. Between Q4 2006 and Q4 2007, Motorola's market share went from 23% to 13% of the global handset market. This decline is really bad considering the global handset market had yearly growth rates at about 10% during the same period. Losing market share in an expanding market is bad.
Motorola's decline has continued into the first half of 2008 - in Q2 2008 Motorola's market share was 9.5% and still declining. If the current development continues for much longer, LG will fulfill their strategic goal for 2010 by replacing Motorola as the world's third biggest handset manufacturer. It may have happened already - the Q3 numbers are not known yet.
So, if the techcrunch story is true, something may really be new at Motorola, and Android is it. Or else it is the same old jumping at every new thing that comes along.
Meanwhile up in Finland, Nokia's latest Nseries handsets - the N79, N85 and N96 coming out just about now - provide what is essentially a text book case on how to leverage the power of the platform to achieve product variety and both integral and modular innovation.
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