It’s not particularly uncommon to see major acquisitions in tech. Motorola has been the victim of this several times over, originally being purchased by Google then sold to Lenovo several years later.
That was a pretty big opportunity for Lenovo to crack into the US market. Lenovo phones are still all but nonexistent in the States, which is a stark contrast to Motorola, who has a long, storied history with the growth of cell phones here.
What happened, Lenovo?
Motorola goes way back
Motorola goes way, way back in cell phone history. They debuted the world’s first cell phone in 1973, which is obviously not at all the same kind of phone that we deal with these days.
A later version went on sale 10 years later in 1983 for thousands of dollars and a 10 hour recharge time. That sounds awful, sure, but at the time? That was cutting edge.
Fast forward a little bit into the 2000’s, and Motorola was still staying ahead of the market. The original RAZR took the world by storm in the early 2000’s, and just about everyone on the block had one. It could text, it flipped, it had a color screen, you name it. It was a big deal.
Want to get even more modern? When the iPhone was just getting off the ground with its AT&T exclusivity, Verizon and Motorola launched the Motorola Droid running Android. It wasn’t the first Android phone on the market, but it was the first one anyone actually cared about. I bet you can still hear that “drooooid” ringtone in your head if you were around for this thing, too.
Lenovo and Motorola
But this isn’t a post about Motorola’s history of cell phones. The point we’re driving here is that Motorola has pretty much always been at the forefront of cell phone technology, and up until very recently, they were almost synonymous with cell phones as a whole. They still had a little bit of that magic with the Moto X and its totally customizable design and everything, but ever since? It’s just been downhill.
Lenovo bought Motorola in 2014. Since then, they’ve launched the Moto Z line, which are cool but have completely failed to garner any kind of positive attention outside of the most extreme tech enthusiasts, and a handful of mid-range and cheap devices that offer pretty good value but are fairly uninteresting otherwise.
And those phones have had plenty of bumps in the road, too. All of the Moto Z models have been plagued with shoddy software support, and at the bottom rung some Moto E phones are honestly pretty bad and not worth your time. The only other truly exciting thing we’ve seen from Lenovo and Moto since that acquisition has been the rebooted Moto RAZR, which had one of the most disastrous phone launches we’ve ever seen and has been clobbered by Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip for its entire (relatively short) lifespan.
It’s really hard to imagine any other missed opportunities as big as this one. Lenovo has absolutely no presence in the US market as far as smartphones are concerned, and whatever plan they’ve had hasn’t been great. They’re a dominant name in home computers, whether you’re buying a Lenovo Yoga Windows PC or an affordable Chromebook, and some of their tablets and connected gadgets are equally useful and cool. Why isn’t any of that making its way to the Motorola team?
Instead, Lenovo has taken a storied brand with household name recognition in the US and gave us a phone with some weird mods and no software updates, and an easily broken foldable gadget, and now Motorola is relegated to the cheap phone you pick up on Cricket because you don’t want to spend more than $80.
It’s baffling that a company the size of Lenovo couldn’t do a better job with software updates, or even simply rebadging some of overseas Lenovo phones with Motorola for the US market. Imagine something like the latest Lenovo Legion phone on sale over here with tight integration into some of Lenovo’s Android tablets and laptops. They’re built to create a Samsung-like experience, and instead, it seems like we just get afterthoughts and me-too products.
If that acquisition was just for patents or talent, why bother keeping Motorola going? If Lenovo is serious about keeping Motorola a successful brand to broaden its stance in the cutthroat US market, why haven’t we seen better efforts?
We should have some actual competition for Samsung besides Apple, and Lenovo feels like they should’ve been able to step up to the plate. Maybe something changes and we get back the old Motorola that was at the top of everyone’s list when shopping for a smartphone, but it feels like the company is doomed to make mid-range products out of the spotlight until Lenovo figures something else out.
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The Link Lonk
July 23, 2020 at 08:30PM
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[Rant] Lenovo's Motorola acquisition has been a huge missed opportunity - TalkAndroid
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