The key to our success from 2004 to 2006 was hitting innovating at the right time, he said, noting that the company was facing the same situation in reverse right now. Clearly, Motorola has struggled in its failure to top the RAZR.
Going forward, Zander said there was still plenty of headroom left in the mobile space, whose sales of 32 handsets per minute is outpacing world population growth by a factor of eight.
When asked about whether the company could make money selling $19 phones in India, he paused, acknowledging the potential market of 1.2 billion. But he followed up by saying that Motorola would have to pick its targets, and would more likely target the hundreds of millions in the middle class who are demanding more of the feature-packed Windows mobile 6-based smart phones at the sweet spot of Motorola’s line.
But it’s not just the $19 phones that are on Motorola’s radar. Asked about how Motorola would deal with Apple’s impending $500 iPhone, he jokingly responded, Don’t quote me, it’s how they will deal with us.
He noted that impending convergence of wireless with home broadband would provide a natural opportunity for Motorola as it hits on two of the company’s core lines: handsets and set-top boxes. The goal would be to seamlessly hand off mobile Internet content from your cell phone onto your broadband system once you re-entered the premises, whether that be home or business.
The emergence of wider area broadband capabilities such as WiMax and LTE, which are predicted for the 2009 – 2012 period, provides the opening for Motorola and the rest of the device industry to cram more HTML onto richer, if not faster devices.
Besides letting kids to download more music and get more engrossed in games wherever they are, Zander also saw growth of mobile broadband as enabling field personnel beyond the constraints of current 3G. With 70% of Motorola’s staff typically deployed beyond the reach of corporate networks, the company is growing device footprints with CRM, sales forecasting, shipment, and other revenue data.
Zander said that broadband networks and portable web-enabled devices would impact PCs in much the same way that PCs supplanted dumb terminals. Of course, the flip side to all that is, it’s one thing to lose a PC, where at least you can encrypt data — it could be even easier to misplace a corporate mobile device.
Zander sounded a note of frustration, that development relies on external factors outside the company’s control. It will be a major challenge to get 3G, CDMA, wireline, and cable devices to work together seamlessly to hand off calls, data services, and sessions in secure, protected fashion, he said, adding that the rules of engagement for the space have yet to be set. Who will be responsible for DRM [digital rights management], security, monetization of content, who gets it, and how will you deliver those services?
But Zander also noted that emergence of the Internet didn’t exactly happen overnight, either. It took us awhile to inhale it, he said.
Zander said that Motorola’s recent acquisitions of Symbol Technologies and Good Technology, providing portable data collection and wireless messaging security, would bolster the company’s push further into the enterprise and public sector space, which currently accounts for about a third of its business. But Zander conceded that Motorola’s brand identification in the space remains weak.
Zander spoke of how Motorola might capitalize on these future opportunities by pointing to its internal and external venture strategies. He pointed to examples like WiMax, which began as a 10-person research effort code-named Canopy three years ago, which has now blossomed into a unit numbering over a thousand.
He looked back on Java, which began with a similar model during his watch at Sun. Java was one of the best stories of innovation, where a small group of guys who got it right, and the rest was history.
