Many were hoping that by now we would have seen the fruits of Google’s procurement over Motorola Mobility. Talk of a greater affinity between the two companies and the products Motorola produces were rife when announcement came that Google would acquire them in August last year, but we still haven’t seen the true benefits a partnership such as this is still expected to bring.
As is still customary, Google reach out to a range of OEMs when it comes to producing their Google Nexus devices; the handsets and tablets designed specifically to showcase each significant release of Android. Indeed Motorola were one of those manufacturers when the original Xoom tablet was the first to offer consumers Android 3.0 Honeycomb, following its launch back at the start of 2011.
The expectations of the new partnership were that a continuation of this closer working relationship would endure as it was with the creation of the Motorola Xoom, producing devices with the capabilities to better realise the potential of Android over the competition’s independent efforts and perhaps taking exclusivity over the production of Nexus-branded device altogether.
Although such a situation hasn’t yet happened, Google’s CFO, Patrick Pichette did have this to stay about the current state of his company’s partnership with Motorola when he recently spoke with The Verge:
“Look, we’re really pleased with Motorola’s progress in its first 150 days. As indicated in our public filings, our team has made a lot of operational changes, we harmonised and narrowed the product portfolio, [undertook] streamlining of software operations, and we scaled back the markets in which we operate. But that said, we’re just at the beginning of the Motorola-Google story, and we should expect, as I mentioned before, results from this segment to be quite variable for quite a while yet.
Remember that we inherited an entire product pipeline where hardware business cycles are typically 12 to 18 months. ”
In essence, despite the fact that a year has already passed during this partnership, Motorola; a company already in full swing, has a product pipeline dating back “12 to 18 months” meaning that these existing products and projects have to be completed before anything new can really make it to market. The timer is definitely ticking away however and the anticipation of 2013 can’t come soon enough, as we’ll finally be able to see what happens when you directly link two companies such as these to introduce cutting-edge new products into the market.
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