Rick Osterloh leaves Motorola as Lenovo realigns business focus

More major changes are being made at Motorola Mobility, the company which now exists under Lenovo after Google turned them loose not long ago. This is probably the most significant change since the company announced major layoffs at Illinois offices and injected the company with Lenovo-bred talent: Rick Osterloh — President — is leaving.

Osterloh — right — showing Motorola phone to Lenovo executives

The decision was apparently made on his own accord, though Lenovo has seemingly known about it for a while as they already have the pieces in place to handle the transition. Part of that transition is bringing in Aymar de Lencquesaing, Lenovo’s former head of North American business, taking his place.

And it’s more than just replacing “Executive A” with “Executive B,” too. Lenovo is completely shuffling their mobile and PC divisons up. Here’s how it all breaks down:

• The PC Group becomes the PC and Smart Devices Business Group. This group focuses on PCs, detachables, tablets, phablets, gaming products and smarthome products.
• The Mobile Business Groups keeps its name, but now focuses entirely on smartphones under the existing Motorola Mobility team. This is where the Osterloh change is being made.
• The Capital and Incubator Group is Lenovo’s division for acquiring and nursing new startups to drive innovation, as well as continuing to push their cloud enterprise services.

It’s interesting that Lenovo is considering phablets and tablets as a completely different business than smartphones, but not entirely unsurprising. Motorola hasn’t been in the tablet space for quite some time, and if they’re the ones spearheading the mobile business they aren’t equipped to start splitting up resources to do that in a time where Lenovo is trying to bring their smartphone business in line.

It makes sense to keep the tablets and convertible notebooks business on their side of the table as they’ve been active in that front as long as we can remember. Let Motorola focus on what they know best — phones — and the rest should take care of itself.

The next Moto device will be the first one with a strong Lenovo influence so we’ll have to see if all of these changes have been for the best or the worst. It’s going to be an exciting ride either way.

[via Lenovo]