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Music Businesses Media Apple

Lack Of iTunes Phone Marketing Irks Motorola 86

Posted by Zonk from the itunes-in-your-pocket dept.
Alias777 writes "Motorola has criticized Apple for not marketing three proposed new phones that will be able to play downloaded music from Apple's iTunes service. "[Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday," says Ron Garriques, president of Motorola's mobile phone division. In response, Motorola has delayed release of the iTunes-equipped phones a few more months."
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Lack Of iTunes Phone Marketing Irks Motorola More

Lack Of iTunes Phone Marketing Irks Motorola

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  • Motorola's Loss (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elliotj ( 519297 ) <slashdot&elliotjohnson,com> on Thursday March 17, 2005 @12:31PM (#11965720) Homepage
    Seems to me that Motorola can complain all they want about Apple. If they delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple. Apple is going to continue to sell iPods with or without Motorola.

    I don't get why they would even whine about this. They should concentrate on launching their phones and spend a little less time criticizing someone who has been an extremely successful businessman and might know a thing or two about consumer marketing.

    • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      why would they whine? to put pressure on apple.
      "hey bitches if you don't co-operate.. well, then we'll walk out on you and find someone who wants to do business WITH us."

      steve tactics don't work that well out of apple, if you don't announce anything the operators will assume that you got nothing coming, and will not do business with you. he's succesful yeah, but the company(apple) isn't extremely succesful.

      • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        but the company(apple) isn't extremely succesful.

        Congratulations! You've posted the most misinformed comment of all of Slashdot this week!

        (Clue: Apple is sensationally profitable, as computer-makers go, and has hundreds of billions in raw cash just lying around.)

      • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Wow... I wish *I* knew how launch a business as unsuccessful as Apple!

    • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      might know a thing or two about consumer marketing

      Apple has nearly complete control over the distribution channel for their 2% of the universe. They don't depend on anyone else to get products to market. They really can announce on Sunday and ship on Monday.

      Most other business aren't so lucky -- they need to get a wide variety of suppliers, retailers, services, and so on in line, and therefore can't "Think Secret" like Apple does. Press Releases and marketing previews start to matter.
      • Motorola and IBM both have direct control over Apple ship dates (makers of the G4 and G5 processors). Besides, Apple of late has done the "look at this great new iDevice now available to buy.... um yeah... we sold out in 10 minutes and your lead time is 2-4 weeks." And it is even worse for the Apple customers outside the USA (Australia is notoriously bad from what I have heard).
        • Selling out your available stock of toys is much, much preferable to not having any toys to sell in the first place.
          • I was speaking of the lack of G4 updates for the longest time, as well as the G5 will be at 3.0GHz in one year that Steve Jobs said when the G5 PowerMac was first announced.
            • "look at this great new iDevice now available to buy.... um yeah... we sold out in 10 minutes and your lead time is 2-4 weeks."

              I don't think there's been an iDevice with a 3Ghz G5. I also don't think they've said "Hey! Updated G4's!" and then sold out of them.
      • Did you nap through this whole iPod/iTunes thing? Hint: Lotsa people bought stuff from Apple.

    • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @12:52PM (#11965934) Journal
      Going by the actual quotes in the summary (and that I've read elsewhere), they're delaying the announcement, the unveiling, until just before they're ready to ship. There isn't a delay of the release, unless by release you mean "talk about it how cool it will be, wait three months, and offer preorders,

      Apple sometimes announces a product up to a month ahead of time, but more often than not that announcement is accompanied by other announcements of products that are ready to ship. Apple also has trouble anticipating demand on some items, so on really popular gear, they sell out quickly.

      • Re:Motorola's Loss (Score:4, Informative)

        by polyhue ( 38042 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:43PM (#11966600)
        Yeah this is a big clash of marketing cultures - Apple's (which they may be the only citizen of) vs. mobile phones, which are demo'd and announced often months ahead of release. Vastly different philosophies.

        I'd bet Apple contractually stopped Moto from unveiling them - I doubt Moto would acquiesce out of kindness. This is the kind of thing Apple would have in legalese in any contract for someone featuring their software so prominently.

    • blame shifting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kaan ( 88626 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:13PM (#11966179)
      "If they [Motorola] delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple."

      This is exactly true, and everybody knows it, including Motorola.

      But consider the following statements, which one sounds better?

      "We, Motorola, are not done with our product that we have been hyping for a while now, so please trust us, it's not vaporware, we really will ship it at some unknown point in the future."

      or

      "Any delays in our product shipment are entirely Apple's fault."

      This is called blame shifting, and sounds a lot like what 4 year old children do to each other ("I only punched her because she looked at me funny! It's not my fault, it's hers!").
    • Seems to me that Motorola can complain all they want about Apple. If they delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple. Apple is going to continue to sell iPods with or without Motorola.

      Seems daft to me. All I can think of is that some Motorola marketing wanker is doing a CYA.

  • Motorola's marketing department is plenty large. One would think that they would market it themselves rather than delay a product launch. Perhaps they have other reasons for the delay and this is the cover.
    • It's probably just cheaper to sit on a stockpile of phones they know they'll sell later anyway than to pay the cash to market the things themselves. But I agree with you, Motorola should suck it up and market their own damn products.

  • Motorola needs to wake up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @12:37PM (#11965777) Homepage
    If anyone knows how to market a product that works with Apple technology, it is Apple. Conventional marketing doesn't quite fly with their products, and would stand completely out of place beside their current efforts. Motorola should realize that their hardware stands to make them a lot of money given the market/mindshare of iTMS. They should just learn to ride the wave when it comes.
    • Motorola should realize that their hardware stands to make them a lot of money given the market/mindshare of iTMS

      Umm...beyond selling the phone, Motorola doesn't make a dime off iTMS sales. Apple does. Furthermore, very few devices (read: none except the iPod) support iTMS. If Apple doesn't hurry up, the market will turn, because there will be differentiation; every other music service will hawk "oh, you can't download that music to your phone or PDA! You can with ours though!" Come to think of it, t

  • WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Monokeros ( 200892 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @12:41PM (#11965822)
    From TFA:
    Motorola Inc. did not show upcoming phones designed to work with Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes digital music service at a recent tech show because of the pair's differing approach...

    Uhm. So Apple isn't marketing Motorola's phones for them. Motorola is responding by NOT showing their phones at a tech show, that is, they aren't marketing their phone at a tech show.

    Motorola is "punishing" Apple for not marketing Motorola's phones by... not marketing the phones??? That's bizarre to me.

    Why is this Apple's job anyway?
    • Reading the actual article, it doesn't sound like a case of punishment to me. It sounds like they're just going with Apple's marketing strategy on this joint venture.

      "The first thing you're seeing here is a merger of two different industries with different ideas of launching products," Ron Garriques, president of Motorola's mobile phone division told analysts and reporters at a news conference at the CTIA U.S. wireless show in New Orleans.

      "Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday

      • But things get really confusing when you start cutting and pasting quotes together. For example, from yesterdays Register article,

        Referring to Apple's CEO, Garriques quipped: "Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday." Motorola, by contrast, launches product only when it's ready to go on the market, he said.

        I'm still trying to make sense out of that given that Motorola is blaming Apple for the delay.
        • The product isn't delayed.

          The anouncement is.

          Motorola is blaming Apple, when the fact is; they would have announced the product and not been able to ship it for months.

    • This is all a smoke screen (Score:5, Funny)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @03:09PM (#11967746)
      The real reason Motorola is complaining is that Apple wanted them to market a one-button cell phone.

  • In other words (Score:3)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Thursday March 17, 2005 @12:58PM (#11966000) Journal
    Motorola is in the huff as they are not getting any free marketing so they huff and they puff and a slashdot story apears , Free advertising to the target audiance *cough*

    Now even worse , as they are not getting any free advertising they are delaying the phone and stabing a potentialy large profit in the foot , Has anyone told them apple make verly little profit on Itunes and make most of it from hardware sales ..

  • Revenge (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 )
    Obviously, this is Steve getting revenge on Motorola for dragging its feet in PowerPC development. (Just think of all the money Motorola's lack of effort cost Apple.)

    • Re:Revenge (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DLWormwood ( 154934 )
      Obviously, this is Steve getting revenge on Motorola for dragging its feet in PowerPC development.

      You do understand that Motorola dragging its feet was in revenge for Apple killing of the Mac cloning program, right? Moto did have a clone line (using the "Tanzania" mobo, IIRC) and they invested some serious R&D capital into the StarMax product series. They didn't even get the buyout offer Apple provided to Power Computing. As a result, Moto refocused their PowerPC processor line towards embedded system

      • Obviously, this is Steve getting revenge on Motorola for dragging its feet in PowerPC development.
        You do understand that Motorola dragging its feet was in revenge for Apple killing of the Mac cloning program, right?
        Wow, it's like the Hatfields & McCoys [blueridgecountry.com] all over again.
      • As I understand it, Apple raised the licensing fees. Where would Mot be if Apple didn't raise capital, and didn't make it today?

        (probably not much different from today where Apple has dropped them as a supplier, but my point is that each depended on the other)
      • Sorry dude, you're repeating a myth. 80% of all G4s sold went to Apple. "Refocusing on the embedded market" is simply not true-Motorola continued to lose ground in the high-end embedded to MIPS and ARM based CPUs prior to the announcement of the Freescale spinoff. The embedded G4s suffered from a lack of updates just as its desktop cousins did.

        The real reason the G4 couldn't get it up is that prior to Freescale's spin-off, Motorola's chip division was poorly managed and poorly funded-Intel and AMD hir
    • Well, maybe not revenge but it sure is funny. Motorola has screwed Apple so many time over the years with late shipping that it is hilarious to hear them moan when Apple wants them to hold up for awhile. It must meant that the form factor to be used on this phone will be different than the rest and Apple wants to be in sole possession of the idea. Showing it before it is ready may not allow this to happen.

    • Re:Revenge (Score:3, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )
      That would be some serious sour grapes, considering that the semiconductor division of Motorola has been spun off as an entirely different unit, called Freescale. [freescale.com] That would be a little bit like punishing Lucent because AT&T Wireless agreed to merge with Cingular.
    • you're aware that that kind of petty treatment is unlikely because of a) the spinoff of Freescale already mentioned and b) the connection between Jobs and Zander. Zander was at Sun when Jobs was running NeXT and I'm guessing the two got together because of the OPENSTEP initiative.

      Also Motorola works in distinct business units; it'd be like shunning IBM from offering consultation on your mainframe setup because five years ago your Thinkpad got 8 dead pixels all of a sudden.

  • Older article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lars T. ( 470328 ) <Lars,Traeger&googlemail,com> on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:06PM (#11966081) Journal
    From Financial Times Deutschland (March 11th) original article in German [www.ftd.de] - (imagine a Google translation link here, the URL refuses to work when posted here).

    This article claims that Apple stopped Motorola from showing the phones. An article on Heise News even claims journalists were kept from making photos of the empty space where the phones were supposed to be presented.

    • Regarding your Winston Churchill quote, Lars... you're the first person I've encountered who doesn't buy into the Anglo-American myth that Churchill was a genius who defended "freedom". That fucker and his father wreaked unwanted havoc in my homeland (Ireland). "Defense of small nations" my arse. While his crew was off fighting wars to defend "little Belgium" they were simultaneously shooting Irish citizens dead in their own streets.
      • Churchill was also a Luddite, as he demanded the destruction of the first programmable, digital electronic computers [nationmaster.com]

        So, getting back OT, since they were built out of telephone exchange parts, they would be almost possible to encode very low quality mp3 (or AAC). With a 1000 characters per second speed, that's about 8kbps encoding. Hmmm, dig that crackle, man.

  • too much complexity in the first place (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Selecter ( 677480 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:26PM (#11966337)
    Ya know what I want to do my my phone? Call people I need to talk to from anywhere to anywhere, at a reasonable price.

    I also want it to have nothing more than what I need to do that task as well. I guess I wont be buying any of these phones. Seriously, whats wrong with a phone being.....a phone?

    • Seriously, whats wrong with a phone being.....a phone?

      Same thing that's wrong with a web browser just being a web browser (not email client, file browser, PIM...). That is nothing.

      Of course I'm one of those heretics who watches TV on a television, listens to music from CDs played through a stereo system and thinks that photo albums are something you put on a shelf to gather dust, instead of just doing it all on my computer.

  • The Marketing Genius of Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SnowDog74 ( 745848 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:30PM (#11966394)
    "[Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday," says Ron Garriques, president of Motorola's mobile phone division.

    Motorola complaining about how Apple markets? Need anyone remind Mr. Garriques that the Apple brand, which just had its most profitable, highest revenue-generating quarter in the company's entire history, has achieved the status of cultural icon and introduced one "it" product after another since Jobs' return?

    Nevermind the fact that Motorola's current line up is, on an economy of scale, as unwiedly, unattractive, unimaginatively-designed and poorly built as the DPC-550 flip phone they introduced some ten years ago.

    Garriques has missed the point. Jobs' approach is right (big surprise).

    The more advance notice you give of a product offering, the more the momentum dies down when the product is actually available--especially if you aren't ready to deliver. Apple learned this lesson the hard way in the mid-90s when the first PowerPC Macintoshes were not being delivered in time to meet demand.

    Apple has taken numerous steps to ensure sustained growth... one of these is delaying marketing until the product arrives. Then they blitz... Doing it the other way around, you're banking everything on that first week. Now people know it's out there, big deal.

    When Apple has a great idea, what they want to do is create yet another cultural phenomenon. One way to do this is to rely heavily on word of mouth to generate buzz... Do you see ANY other computer manufacturers inserting logo stickers in their packaging? Do you see anyone driving a car with a Windows or Dell sticker on the rear windshield? You'll see it with Apple owners all the time (myself included). Why? Because since the days of Guy Kawasaki and the EvangeList, evangelizing has always been one of Apple's marketing strongholds... it has to be backed up, of course, by good product.

    Dell isn't an amazing piece of machinery, it's a discount box... Naturally, who the hell cares to advertise they own a Dell? Owning a Dell certainly doesn't signal that you have, indeed, arrived. It just means you're cheap.

    Another thing... Apple's stores... walk by... do you see how it works? Huge glass windows, uncluttered real estate... white backdrops against which the products stand out like fashion displays.... People are magnetized by it and go in. Make no mistake, every element of the Apple Store design was pretty carefully conceived to maximize marketing potential.

    Want a PC Clone? Go to Best Buy and search for it amidst a sea of heavily cluttered displays with unknowledgeable people who don't know the damnedest thing about computers. So there you are.

    Apple builds an experience, and they want to keep building it. You know... I never would have thought it, but the first time I was peeking into a Mercedes at the Mercedes-Nissan dealership that serviced my Nissan, the salespeople knew exactly what they were doing when they handed me the keys to an $80,000 S-class sedan with only these words, "Just bring it back before we close." That's all it took... I was hooked by the experience of driving that thing and could never be the same. Next car I got was a Mercedes C240 with a very competitive lease. Why? Oh, come on... they know I'll be back for more.

    So does Apple.

    • Apple builds an experience, and they want to keep building it. You know... I never would have thought it, but the first time I was peeking into a Mercedes at the Mercedes-Nissan dealership that serviced my Nissan, the salespeople knew exactly what they were doing when they handed me the keys to an $80,000 S-class sedan with only these words, "Just bring it back before we close." That's all it took... I was hooked by the experience of driving that thing and could never be the same. Next car I got was a Merce
      • I currently own a CLK430 and my wife worked at a Mercedes dealership up until just recently so I'm pretty informed when it comes to their model lines. An S 430/500 is a completely different car then a C240, about the only thing they have in common is the symbol on the hood. Was your wife in sales? As an avid German car enthusiast, I've gained comprehensive knowledge of the history of Mercedes-Benz and DaimlerChrysler (formerly Daimler-Benz) for years... and I have to beg to differ with you here. In 2001,
      • Sorry... forgot the paragraph stops... a few edits for clarity and this should also be easier to read, with the paragraph stops: I currently own a CLK430 and my wife worked at a Mercedes dealership up until just recently so I'm pretty informed when it comes to their model lines. An S 430/500 is a completely different car then(sic) a C240, about the only thing they have in common is the symbol on the hood.

        Was your wife in sales? As an avid German car enthusiast, I've gained comprehensive knowledge of th

  • Feck off, Moto (Score:1, Insightful)

    by iainl ( 136759 )
    So Motorola don't like the way Apple promote things?

    Given the fact that every time I see a Motorola advert I want to smash the thing with a brick, but iPods are so trendy that no-one even says "mp3 player" when "iPod" will do, this is rather like Lada complaining about Rolls Royce's build-quality.

  • Motorola. . . irked? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kerkyon ( 584936 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:52PM (#11966724)
    Motorola hasn't delayed the release of the phone, it's just delayed showing and announcing the phone. From the several articles on the subject that I've read, Motorola doesn't in fact appear to be "irked" and they have not in any way "criticized" Apple. In fact, from the AP article [yahoo.com] on the subject, Motorola seems to be agreeable to the decision: "'We were doing it (the announcement) the old way,' Zander said." Alias777 probably should have read the article.
  • Apple is no stranger to the 'market way before you ship' either. Although they don't typically wait YEARS before actually shipping a product they are hyping, The F5 and 17" Powerbook were among the worst offenders in recent years. Some apple stores did not even get a 17" Powerbook until a couple of months after the announcement.

    OTOH we have been hearing about Nano-ITX for TWO years now and VIA is still not shipping.

  • But phones ARE different ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by __aadkms7016 ( 29860 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @01:58PM (#11966798)
    What Moto is saying here is that the marketing of a phone is different than the marketing of a normal consumer product, because the chain of sales has so many links. Moto sells in bulk to carriers, a carrier markets though an array of retail and wholesale channels, and it simply isn't possible to pave the way for a new product through those channels with "need to know" secrecy.

  • why Motorola is complaining... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @02:21PM (#11967073) Journal
    The fundamental problem is most likely because Motorola's primary customers are Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular.... where Apple's primary customers are just people.

    The wireless companies take time to react to things. They are slow. They need to know about a product well ahead of time so that they can develop their marketing materials, do studies to determine the proper price point, and work out any implementation details on their networks. So Motorola normally gives them a several month lead time on new products so they can get ready.

    Apple, on the other hand, sells to you and me. We don't need prep time to buy an iPod, we just buy one.

    The thing is, in this market, end-user customers are a tiny, tiny fraction of the total market. Unless and until the big cellular carriers are selling this phone, Motorola just isn't going to move very many. The 'announce Sunday, ship Monday' culture simply DOES NOT WORK for their customers, the people who buy 98% of their product. Without that long lead time and solid coordinated pushes from the wireless carriers, an iTunes phone won't sell well. By the time the channel is really ready to start pushing them, the initial buzz will be all gone, and the product may never do well.

    This is a case, I think, where Motorola is right to be upset with Apple. Apple, however, may not care. An announcement today of products available in the summer may impact THEIR sales as people delay purchases. So this move is likely in Apple's best immediate interest. It's a big problem for Motorola, and may have a bad long-term impact on Apple due to fewer iTunes customers.

    Apple may be becoming a bit dangerous to partner with.... it'll bear watching.
    • From Investor's Business Daily [yahoo.com]

      Details of the delay remain vague. But industry watchers say the Motorola-iTunes phones, as well as digital music on cell phones in general, still needs to find a way for carriers to make money.

      "The network operators may see some incremental revenue from digital music downloads," said Gartner analyst Ben Wood, "but it won't be the bonanza many predicted."

      Product details are scant. But the iTunes-equipped Motorola phones were supposed to download songs from a desktop compu

  • "Innovators Do It Innovatively" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @03:00PM (#11967624)
    This article reminds me of those beach T-shirts "Divers Do It Deeper" and so on.

    The thing is that Motorola doesn't do a whole lot of innovating. They do a whole lot of embracing and extending. There is a completely different phylosophy at work:

    Embrace and Extend model:
    (1) wait for an innovation
    (2) wait for market reaction
    (3) reverse engineer competetive product
    (4) profit by reduced R&D costs, fewer "oops" moments (a la Mac Cube, etc)

    The key to this is to let the public know you will 'soon' have a product just as good or better than the innovator's, preferably at a lower cost.

    Innovators Model:
    (1) be first to market with a faster/better/cheeper way of doing something
    (2) DRIVE market reaction (e.g. get early adopter testimonials, etc)
    (3) build the product inhouse under high levels of secrecy to ensure (1)
    (4) profit by first mover advantage (Netscape), free publicity and market cache of being the innovator (TiVo), and hopefully market domination (eBay, iPod).

    The key here is to surprise the market, and competition, with your product. Ususally, Innovators don't have the manufacturing/distribution capacity to deliver mass quantities on day 1 anyway. Because the product or service is innovative, the customer really needs to see it and use it to perceive the value.

    So merging an innovator with an embracer yields this Apple/Motorola conundrum. Just weight the Pros and Cons of an early product announcement:
    Pre-availability Announcement:
    Pros
    - Media exposure (free publicity)
    - Market reaction to better guage demand
    - Price point reaction to better guage promotions
    - Use of the above to negotiate deals with Carriers to sell the phone
    Cons
    - Media exposure will be lower when product is released
    - Competitors get sneak-peek at what is coming
    - Impulsive customer base (young adults) may find their appetite has changed once product is available
    - Loose the impact/anticipation of an "unveiling"

    Plus, in this cell phone market, products promissed and then delivered half baked or way late (Sprint's Bluetooth Sony Ericsson T810 or whatever that was less than expected) really drive customers away.

  • Forgot part of the process (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chromaphobic ( 764362 ) on Thursday March 17, 2005 @05:14PM (#11969366)

    [Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday,

    They left off the last step. It should be: Launch a product on Sunday, sell it on Monday, actually ship it to the customer two months later.

    I love my Mac, but c'mon, pratically every new Apple product launch is accompanied by a long waiting list for said product immediately afterwards.

  • I read this totally differently... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by njfuzzy ( 734116 ) <ian&ian-x,com> on Thursday March 17, 2005 @05:40PM (#11969659) Homepage
    This post puts a very strange spin on this...

    As I saw it, Motorola was planning to heavily pre-market these phones. That is, announce them and show them off long before they were ready to be sold.

    Then Apple said, "Don't do that." They didn't want hype surrounding something that wasn't even available yet. This is something Apple has been moving away from.

    So, really, Moto was going to announce these too soon, and agreed not to based on Steve's feedback. That's totally different from what this post implies.

  • ...you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday,"... In response, Motorola has delayed release of the iTunes-equipped phones a few more months.

    so, what're they trying to get to? is motorola trying to delay the marketing more? if they recognize that Apple doesn't push products until they're pretty much available (with some exceptions), is it that big of a logical leap to realize that making the product available later is going to make the marketing available later, too?

  • 1) Jobs doesn't care whether the phone succeeds (for various reasons ranging from the soured Moto relationship to his Apple-centric concerns to his plan to introduce a similar product)

    2) Jobs is used to selling to a built-in audience clamoring for new product

    3) Jobs knows something about the future of iTMS that Moto and we don't (e.g., it won't survive the labels' greed)

  • Motorola Take *FOREVER* (Score:3, Insightful)

    by autarkeia ( 152712 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @12:47AM (#11972668) Homepage
    Motorola takes forever to develop and launch phones. For example, the v600 and the phones based on the same platform (basically all of the vXXX phones with some exceptions) were all supposed to start shipping in Q2 of 2003. They ended up not shipping until Q2 of 2004, literally a year late.

    A couple of years ago one of my very good friends was hired as part of the small team designing new phones for Moto when they realized they were losing market share because their phones basically sucked. Even he didn't know when the v600 was actually going to ship, and he helped design the damned thing!

    Differences in marketing between consumers and phone carriers aside, Motorola has a horrible history of delivering their products late. Past performance would indicate that they are shifting the blame to Apple in this instance even though they have no idea when their product will truly be ready.
  • Maybe Motorola's iTune phones just aren't up to Apple's standards to carry the brand? Often Moto products have great potential but end up being stunted in some way, like their A630, great form factor but lacking in UI and display. I think there's little to get excited about in a normal-ish phone that plays iTunes. What Apple should do is maybe take its iPod Mini or Shuffle (display added) and incorporate a phone (GSM please) with Motorola's assistance, that would be exciting.
  • How do you like them apples Motorola!

    Delaying this thing purposefully for revenge on Motorola for leaving Apple high and dry with the languishing G4 processor seems most Jobsian to me.

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