Shifting Gears at Motorola

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A New Platform

Executing on cool experiences will start with a revamp of Motorola's phone platform. Garriques explained that Motorola has gone through only one platform transition in the past eight years. A new, user-friendly platform can be found in the recently introduced MotoFone, released in emerging markets last fall. But that phone isn't packed with cutting-edge camera, music player, and Internet-search applications.

To address the high-end market, where Motorola is suddenly suffering most, it recently introduced an offshoot of the RAZR, called the Motorola RIZR Z6, available by midyear, whose cover slides up to reveal the keypad. Its most important component: a new operating system designed to be a snap to use.

To nail simplicity, Zander pushed his troops to develop phones with a more elegant design and easier-to-use features. Despite its nifty outside, the RAZR (as well as most other Motorola phones) runs an aging, homegrown operating system. That's a big reason why it has been dogged by persistent customer complaints about the difficulty in using basic features such as texting, finding phone numbers, and shooting photos.

Just Two Clicks Away

Consumers will likely be happier with their RIZR experience. The new phone uses the open-source Linux operating system and Sun Microsystems' (SUNW) Java. It manages to offer 7.5 hours of talk time, nearly twice what some models of the RAZR offer.

The RIZR's operating system is designed to eliminate the number of key clicks required for users to send messages, download music, and view photos. The company strove to make every task just one or two clicks away. "We really wanted to have something that is easier and simpler to use," says Scott Durchslag, Motorola's vice-president for strategy.

If Zander has his way, the majority of Motorola phones (as much as 60%) will soon feature the new software platform. Ease of use is one reason, but by shifting from proprietary software to an open-source system such as Linux-Java, Motorola can squeeze costs out of the process. Motorola licenses the Java software from Sun, which created a community called JavaOne for software developers. That means when Motorola engineers are faced with the urgent task of developing the code that becomes the building blocks for new and cool applications, it has a broader pool of developers to tap. Once Motorola migrates the bulk of phones to that platform, innovation comes more swiftly. And, Zander hopes, so will profits.

Crockett is BusinessWeek's deputy Chicago bureau chief. With Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.