By If you haven’t heard the news, Chinese regulators have finally approved the acquisition that would see Google acquiring Motorola. It should all be in the books by the the end of this week as this was their last hurdle for closing the $12 billion deal. Most would think this is cause for celebration, but one group of people may not be rejoicing when it’s all said and done.
TechCrunch has apparently gotten word that Motorola and Google will be laying off around 30% of Motorola’s employees sometime after the sale is complete. That exact figure has since been removed, but the post still suggests layoffs will happen.
It’s an ugly part of business, but when two companies come together like the way Google and Motorola have, among many others, it happens. Whether it be due to efficiency, financial troubles, or other reasons for downsizing, it happens. We’ll know before too long if any of this is true, but for now it’s just a rumor.
Sadly, it won’t make their phones any better.
Their phones are already great, only thing I can think that would make them better is an unlockable bootloader and a few features from other skins.
Their phones are buggy and rushed out the door with critical hardware flaws. I had to send in my Atrix for repairs twice, and it still had random reboots. Their “support” (and I use the term very loosely) forums are filled with ignored complaints, and their track record for Android OS upgrades is one of the worst in the industry. Motorola doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “customer”. To them support of a phone stops at the point of sale. They are perfectly happy to abandon all older (read: 2 months old) devices while flooding the market with barely distinguishable variants.
All manufacturers are guilty of this to some extent, but Motorola takes the cake.
Well I haven’t had an atrix but I’ve had 4 moto smartphones and they had no more bugs than any other manufactures. I have had HTC and never will again because the sound quality was horrible, I couldn’t even use the speaker phone. The HTC aux jacks messed up within weeks (on all 6 replacements I had) as well as the buttons sinking into the shell of the phone and getting stuck, however it did have decent cell reception, but 4g reception was non existent. I’ll never own Samsung or LG again because of the several I have owned had horrible reception. I love Samsung products, just not their phones.
I agree. Motorola and their ‘superior’ hardware is WAY overrated. The GNex is just as good, if not better, then anything Motorola puts out. This whole ‘GNex’ signal issue got blown way out of porportion over a simple display error.
I resepctfully disagree. I went back to using my Droid X2 because with the GNex I couldn’t use my phone in about 20 places I regularly visit that my moto worked fine in. One of those being my house. I do still do my dev stuff on the Gnex but these things are phones first and the GNex does not cut it as a phone with it’s horrible radios and reception.
Also, I know it is a not a “Display Error” My wife has a RAZR and can sit and my parents house with full signal and get 3G service and my phone won’t connect at all for data. All the same options checked multiple reboots there is a problem with the GNex not sure if it is just some of them and perhaps I should send mine back bu at this point I don’t want a refurb. Maybe there was a few bad batches and if there were VZW and Samsung should have done and said something about it. Instead of claiming it was all software.
Only the ones responsible for motoBLUR, I bet. What, too soon?
You’re an idiot
What a thoughtful and well written reply. You should apply to be an editor somewhere.
I hope they keep motoblur but unlock the bootloader. I don’t like blur but all the skins do bring a few things to the table (that I hope are built into stock Android soon) like the blur dialer (best dialer by far) I hate sense but their weather is great, and it has different sound profiles for when headphones are plugged in or unplugged.
I wouldn’t mind BLUR that much if it didn’t spread its roots throughout the OS and make it impossible to remove the bloat.
I definitely agree with that, we should be able to uninstall anything that wont hinder performance. If they did that and their apps weren’t built into each other we could run asop roms with the few great apps the skins do offer.
I look forward to seeing what this brings in the future. I had the DroidX and now the Razr. Both where solid phones that could take a beating. Blur never really bothered me, and the ICS for the razr looks to have finally served up a good balance.
Motorola has to refresh it’s Brand image, same as Nokia
Jha already “Stepped Down”, Google should have just told the truth and said he was flat out fired for being a tool the last year and a half.
This article is about JOB LOSS, and all you people can talk about is SPECS ON PHONES…wow… Let’s focus on the fact that yet again a major corporation does a buy out and cuts jobs to only INCREASE job loss….and stick more money into the HEAD peoples pockets….Way to think about the little people Google….way to go….Just LOVE the corporate world!
You’re really full of it. Obviously what they were doing at Motorola was not really working out and more people would have lost jobs eventually when Motorola filed for bankruptcy. This has been preempted by Google buying Motorola. Hopefully a lot of the fired people will be re-hired.
All I was simply stating was this article had nothing to do about specs, but about people losing jobs, yet people want to still go on here and talk phones and not about the job loss. Nobody cares about anybody but themselves anymore and it’s pretty sad. Who cares about phones when people are losing jobs to try and “better them”. I get Moto mobile was going down, but let’s not ignore the fact that this merger cost people jobs. Everybody SCORNED AT&T for the possible merger costing jobs, but Google does it and it’s ok…yeah that makes sense….
Motorola was already having pretty bad quarters. It was obvious they were not a very efficient company. Would you have prefered the whole company went down or just 30% of it?
Two things drive job cuts after a buyout/merger. One is synergy. Functional areas that are duplicated between the two companies are combined and resized. The second is a change in business strategy. In this case, word is that Motorola will be focusing on fewer, but more specialized phones each year. Good news for less fragmentation and more timely updates, but bad news for the employees working on the teams that are no longer needed. If they reduce 8 models per year to just 4, discounting the platform specific teams and only looking at product specific, you could get close to a 30% reduction in that alone.
You also get reduction by no longer needing GSM and CDMA groups if all phones you produce are LTE, though that’s a little longer term since the “4G” technologies currently deployed are pretty diverse still.
Actually us Tmobile customers didn’t want the merger because AT& T is a ripoff.
I hope among them would be the person who decided not to upgrade a lot of their pretty powerful handsets to ICS.