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Motorola Insider Blame Game: Engineers Shoved Designers Aside [Motorola]

These days, most in-the-know folks would sooner eat glass than carry a Motorola phone. The company has shredded its reputation by failing to address basic interface design issues: freeze-prone software, head-scratching menus, keys that demand Herculean strength. It’s baffling that such a venerable company could build such frustrating phones, considering the zillions presumably spent on development. How did Motorola make such a bollocks of its wireless division? Now that the company has annointed new wireless division chief Sanjay Jha, we surveyed former staffers for the inside scoop, as well as their advice on how to right the ship.

Insiders always start by attacking Motorola’s corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company’s bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systemsnot just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they’re peons.

“There’s this amazing wealth of engineering talent, but there’s no system for harnessing that talent for the good of the consumer,” says one former Motorola executive. The men in the R&D labs are permitted to indulge their flights of fancy, many of which center on fine-tuning antennas to optimize reception. Meanwhile, no one pays much attention to more prosaic fundamentals such as reliable software.

Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalized by the engineers, who dismiss its concernsand, to a large extent, its very existenceas inconsequential. “With the engineers,” he said, “there’s this attitude of, “I createwhat do you do? You pick out colors?’”

The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have “deity status” at the companyno matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.

The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR’s overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company’s next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naughtthe research was simply ignored by Motorola’s top brass. “They have this attitude of, ‘Well, I’ve built phones for 20 years, I know what I’m doing,” says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto’s stick-in-the-mud managers.

Motorola’s managerial bumbling has resulted in severe cultural malaisea condition made worse by the mobile unit’s location in the deep Chicago suburbs, hardly a place awash in creative energy. (Few 22-year-old design wunderkinds are willing to forego the Bay Area in favor of Libertyville.)

Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But achat viagra Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous cellphones; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

Take, for example, the levitra navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Qrelatively powerful, but why in heaven’s name didn’t it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola’s aging quality-control program wasn’t designed to catch such annoying foibles.

Six Sigma and its companion product-development methodology, dubbed “M-Gates,” both stress caution in the name of quality. But when it comes to innovation, there’s certainly such a thing as too much wariness. In planning its software path after the RAZR’s smashing success, Motorola knew (to its credit) that its Synergy OS was antiquated. But instead of developing a worthy successor, the company decided to wait around for Windows Mobile, ostensibly because it was a sure thing. Big mistake, as we all now know. Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations. That’s left the company scrambling for replacem …