Motorola brand to cease to exist
Motorola brand to cease to exist
Smartphone manufacturer Lenovo will dump US mobile phone pioneer’s name following its acquisition two years ago, hanging up the line on a famous brand
Friday 8 January 2016 22.59 AEDT Last modified on Friday 8 January 2016
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Motorola, the brand which invented the mobile phone, brought us the iconic "Motorola brick", and gave us both the first flip-phone and the iconic Razr, is to cease to exist.
Bought from Google by the Chinese smartphone and laptop powerhouse Lenovo in January 2014, Motorola had found success over the past two years. It launched the Moto G in early 2014, which propelled the brand, which had all but disappeared after the Razr, from a near-0% market share to 6% of sales in the UK.
The Moto G kickstarted the reinvigoration of the brand, which saw Motorola ship more than 10m smartphones in the third quarter of 2014, up 118% year-on-year.
But now Lenovo has announced that it will kill off the US mobile phone pioneer’s name. It will keep Moto, the part of Motorola’s product naming that has gained traction in recent years, but Moto smartphones will be branded under Lenovo.
Motorola chief operating officer Rick Osterloh told Cnet that "we’ll slowly phase out Motorola and focus on Moto".
The Moto line will be joined by Lenovo’s Vibe line in the low end, leaving the fate of the Moto E and G uncertain. The Motorola Mobility division of Lenovo will take over responsibility for the Chinese manufacturer’s entire smartphone range.
A Lenovo spokesperson said: "Motorola Mobility continues to exist as a Lenovo company and is the engineering and design engine for all of our mobile products."
They said that the company hadn’t used the Motorola brand specifically on its products since the Moto X in 2013, despite being used on the packaging and website branding.
Reception of the news was mixed. Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel said: "The only segment where this might help is within the enterprise market, just because of Lenovo’s presence within computers, but even there it is not necessary."
Osterloh said that it will be a consolidation of brands to cover a larger market segment, with the Vibe handsets targeting a segment of smartphones costing $100 or less in the US.
But for many, the loss of the Motorola brand is an end of an era showing just how far the pioneering US phone company has fallen.
• Did you own an original brick phone? A StarTac or Razr? Or maybe even the ill-fated Motorola iTunes phone, the Rokr? Tell us you favourite Motorola moments in the comments below.
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I was a director at Moto.
When Motorola was engineering led it dominated. It was the influx of MBAs and a belief that all that mattered was getting the process right which killed it. A strong element of of blame has to be laid at the door of Mckinsey & Co which exacerbated the software management problems by adding more and more layers of authorisation and gating. Razr was done as a skunkworks.
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93External consultants who didn't understand the business to blame? Surely not?
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McKinsey exist to put their people into roles and charge the client excessive amounts for the privilege.
Just like Accenture, KMPG, Deloitte......
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It's easy to blame consultants and make them the panto villains but ultimately its management who must take responsibility for bringing them in often with the most cyncial intentions. Businesses often use them as made-to-measure scapegoats to deal with problems that they can't solve themselves or which are politically problematic and require either too much cost cutting, restructuring or job losses then they can stomach.
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I suspect a tear rolled down your cheek as your typed that:(
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They are getting rid of Motorola, not Moto, Google should have done it before they sold up.
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I remember when Motorola only made test instruments for electronics labs...
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I think you are mistaken and thinking of Hewlett Packard (Test and Measurement division now called Keysight)
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Nope I used to have a Motorola T1015A Oscilloscope for example...
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Shame to see it go, I always respected Motorola for their engineering standards and product quality. I still own and use a Razr-i but when it ceases to function I will then migrate to Sony.
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My old second hand Mercedes had a Motorola 2900 series built in to the centre console, it wasn't in commission by this point but I liked the fact it was there! :D
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The black Razr was beautiful but the OS was awful. A bit weird their not using the well-known brand name. Are they selling the name on so someone else can have a go? I suspect someone would be interested.
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Google should have kept Motorola to build their tablets and smartphones in the Nexus/Pixel line for them, and not caved in to Samsung and sold it. Would've probably given Android it's true 'all under one roof' in iPhone competitor by now.
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Google don't want that tho, they gain masses by getting others to build the handsets while they provide the basic OS and have an App marketplace. Moreover it encourages competition between handset manufacturers on both price and features, while limiting vendor-lock-in, unlike Apple (NB I own an iPhone)
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Hmm a few years ago probably but with mobile growth changing it leaves them vulnerable, traditional Android OEM's Google had as partners like HTC, LG and Sony are slowly going to wall for smartphones, with Apple creaming off the top and Chinese makers eating the bottom... The Chinese are using Android but in forked versions which Google doesn't benefit from, and with apps and walled gardens like Apple and Facebook eating the web money from search and ads will be on the wane. With total control over both hardware and software they'd be able directly innovate against Apple, even with the Android OEM's in competition against each other Apple still came up with Retina display, 3D Touch and finger print scanners in the mass market first. Leaving Android in catch up.
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It may have been the case that owning Moto would have increased Google's exposure to IP lawsuits?
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I've owned the Motorola International 5200 (Vodafone Personal World tariff - thank you Hutchinson for buying me out of that, and putting me on Orange, two months in), the Motorola V3688 (first dual band phone, so I could roam on my first business trip) and two Razrs.
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Oh, and Motorola's first tri-band phone sold in the UK (forget its name) for my first trip to the US (and it worked perfectly in Wichita).
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Had a brick in the 80s and now got a Moto 3rd gen, both cost about the same though the brick was 2nd hand & came with Cellnet contract, ouch !
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Shouldn't a stronger element of blame be laid at Motorola management who decided to get Mckinsey & Co in the first place ?
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so that's Nokia & Motorola gone, blackberry not too far behind
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At least this will end the confusion for Motorola Solutions who continue to use the Motorola name for their products
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As they are quite entitled to do, given that they're, well, Motorola products.
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Motorola Solutions' Enterprise business (including all those bar-code reader hand-held terminals you see in stores and warehouses) is part of Zebra these days. No idea whether there are any plans to rebadge the terminals though....
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Actually, I think these were rebranded to Symbol years earlier anyway. (It's almost easier to keep up with Grant Shapps' rebranding.....)
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I've got a Moto E and Moto G. Both decent phones for the price. Sad to see Lenovo dropping the brand. I wonder what the sales were between Lenovo branded phones vs the Motos.
I remember when the Startac came and how my friends who owned them answered the phone when they got a call. Hands in the pocket, pulled out the phone, flicked open the phone and saying"Yo, wha' gwan?, Oh hi Mum"
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They're keeping the Moto branding, just dropping Motorola.
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I bought a Moto G last year. It was horribly slow and the camera was awful. Couldn't recommend it to anyone.
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Obviously a faulty phone, replace as a moto g is the best budget phone by far
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Talking of much loved 90s products, where else did I see the Motorola logo .....
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Police radios on TV and films were nearly always Motorola branded.
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What I think was the greatest part of the Motorola empire is their semiconductor industry which which was spun off from Motorola as a separate company, Freescale, and still seems to be able to put up a fight against Intel.
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Absolutely. Given Motorola's undoubted skills in designing and manufacturing integrated circuits, I'm surprised they weren't able to get some real synergy, with the semiconductor teams developing the chips and the mobile phone people using them to make great phones.
How did it come to this? How did they manage to lose their market-leading position?
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Motorola Solutions still exists as a separate company too.
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Freescale alas has given up the fight - it was acquired in December by NXP, which is Philips old Semiconductor division.Freescale, and still seems to be able to put up a fight against Intel.
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My first mobile phone was a Motorola c520, bought through Orange in 1999. I think it cost me £99.99 to buy, with a monthly contract of £16.99 that entitled me to 15 minutes off-peak calls a month. I called my girlfriend on her Vodafone Sagem on A-level results day; think I got billed over £40 for that particular half-hour call...
It was a rugged old thing; I used it for four years until the lack of selectable call menu and having to type every single letter of a text message into a single line wore me down. I was also impressed that it could run off 4xAA batteries if the main battery pack ran down. I actually switched it on the other day and was impressed that it was still functioning - though a couple of pixels have dropped out of the screen. I'm not overly sentimental about phones - my others have all been recycled once they broke - but I still have this one. Cheerio, Moto.
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The days when you couldn't text cross-network, calls off network were 50p a minute and WAP was a fancy thing that suits used on their brick sized PDA's...
Eeey, when I were a lad...
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erm.. PDAs, at least the Windows CE ones had HTML browsers, not WAP.
WAP was designed for phones with tiny screens. PDAs tended to have "large" screens.
The 1999 Nokia 7110 was the first phone with a WAP browser.
I eventually upgraded that to a Nokia 7650 (2002)- which had WAP but also allowed you to download a java based app called Doris (released by Anygraaf, which allowed you to view HTML sites). Who other than a Finnish company would call the world's first phone HTML browser Doris?
TBH it was a bit pants as a browser, so I used to use the phone as a Bluetooth modem for my Windows PDA.
2 years later (2004) I just decided to by a 3.5" touchscreen smartphone running Windows Mobile. Why carry two devices when you could carry one?
And to think that by the time that apple had released a 3.5" touchscreen smartphone in 2007, some of us already had phones with 5" screens (and 3G, GPS etc).
Nokia, Motorola and HTC, possibly 3 of the most innovative phone manufacturers of all time, unfortunately largely ignored by vast swathes of the popular press.
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Not to mention having to pay a 'service charge' on PAYG, so a % of your top up was just eaten by the network. Ahhh the good old days
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its a great shame... I owned the startac and Razr... still the best flip phones I ever owned..
even now when I pick up the razr i still think its a great phone but just lake all the smart phone functionalities.. -
I had a StarTac and then a Razr.
The Razr in particular is a beautifully made bit of hardware - it's the only out-of-use handset I have bothered to keep because it's such a lovely object. The noise it makes when you close it is SOOOO satisfying. It also has a strong, nostalgic dose of the Star Trek Communicator about it, which as a child of the '70's was irresistible.
I was strongly tempted to get my son a Moto smartphone as his first mobile - he preferred to have my secondhand iPhone 5 (perhaps shows the powerful effect of marketing, want-one status symbol and style have on a 10 y.o!) -
My first ever mobile in 1999 was a motorola flip phone. It was cute but there was no way of knowing who was calling without actually flipping it open and thus answering.... which was a bit annoying.
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My first flip was a motorola 7200 around 1994 - like a bat phone you'd have to pull up the ariel to answer.
You could see the screen without flipping it open to answer though.. reckon you got stiffed there kizbot.
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So my Motorola Moto E is now a Lenovo Moto E?
I can live with that, as long as it still makes and receives calls and texts.
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No mention of Moto's most significant invention - the one that gave them their name? I 7?
The humble car radio.
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Quite - I think this is a typical Guardian 'article by a young person for young people'. Motorola was a universally recognised brand name forty and more years ago, for car radios (Motor-ola, geddit?), the lunar landing transmissions ("One small step for man, etc.") and a host of other electronic instruments.
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The Motorola brand will not "cease to exist", except on phones.
Motorola was spun off into two companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Google, and then Lenovo, only bought the former. The latter still exists as an independent entity, with the Motorola logo and everything: https://www.motorolasolutions.com
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But not at Easter Inch or Brucefield, more's the pity...
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You could say the same about IBM or Nokia, but when the brand is lost from the flagship entity, it is lost from the minds of the consumers.
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Nope - sold to freescale and then mergerd with NXP according to wikipedia.
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Lenovo - unreliable to say the least. If their desktop pc network interfaces are anything to go by, their phones must be frequently dropping off the network.
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Funay as I've always though of "Lenovo" as crappy cheap brand whereas I would associate "Motorola" with top end electronics such as Walki-talkis and such like.
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Lenovo still make high quality kit. It's just that you have to buy the stuff they make for the enterprise like Thinkpads and Thinkcentres rather than the consumer stuff.
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Kit with recipe handed down by IBM otherwise they would be making stuff for the 99p store (bit OTT but just for kicks)
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They aren't a cheap crappy brand. We have two Lenovo laptops in the house, both used every day, and they have been very reliable. Better in fact than both Acer and HP. Looks like you have contracted AES (Auto Express Syndrome), i.e. if it isn't an over-hyped premium German brand (so in reality overpriced and of distinctly average quality) then it's crap.
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