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Chutes & Ladders: Motorola's CTO resigns, too
Following the resignation of CEO Ed Zander, Motorola's chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior has left the company, too. Reports claim that Motorola had been preparing for Warrior's departure since October. It's not entirely clear if she left for a new opportunity or if she was pushed out, or perhaps both. Still, Zander and Warrior appear to be getting most of the blame for Motorola's inability to produce a great follow-up to the RAZR--as the chief technologist and leader of thousands of other engineers at Motorola, Warrior deserves some blame.
However, no one else in the mobile industry came up with a better idea than the RAZR either, until this year's debut of the iPhone, a device that belongs in a whole different class and kicks off a whole new device era. What's being overlooked is Warrior's work with WiMAX and other wireless technologies and applications. If innovation is only about achieving higher sales than your last good idea, then there must be an awful lot of good ideas that don't get to see the light of day. -Dan
For more:
- check out this article in The Chicago Tribune
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Comments
Posted by Anonymous | December 5, 2007 - 1:48pm
You would also think that the CTO is more strategic and forward looking than what's the next handset look like. That blame, to the extent people want to place blame, should be on the product managers whose job is to come up with the next razr devise
Posted by Anonymous | January 16, 2008 - 2:55pm
Mrs. Warrior is not to blame for Motorola's recent lackluster product performance. The corporate CTO does not oversee handset development. Technologies applicable to mobile phones are developed by the corporate CTO orgasnization. But whether or not they find their way into mobile phones is entirely up to the Executives in Motorola's Mobile Devices business.
Mobile Device business has it's own CTO. This organization went outside it's charter and developed the Razr as a product development excercise. The rest is history.
