Google must 'drain' Motorola pipeline before hitting 'wow'
Google's Motorola Mobility unit has at least a six month legacy product pipeline to drain before it can launch anything "wow", according to Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette.
Google's Nexus phones and tablets and Chrombooks meet the company's standard for beauty and intuitiveness, but Motorola Mobility is still some way off from reaching the point it can deliver anything similar.
"So Motorola has this great set of assets but it has a pipeline of products that were fine but not really to the standard that Google would say is 'wow, innovative, transformative'," Pichette said in an address to the Morgan Stanley Technology conference on Thursday.
Google bought Motorola Mobility in May 2012 and while Pichette says the company has has been working on the "next agenda" from day one, it came saddled with an 18 month pipeline of products. Incidentally, the CFO's "preferred devices" he currently uses are the Nexus 4 and the high-end Chromebook Pixel.
"So we have been working really hard...to take a hold of Motorola and really putting it on a trajectory that's really much more what we believe at Google is the right mindset and the right timeframes," said Pichette.
"So you invest for the long term, but we've inherited 18 months of pipeline that we actually have to drain right now while we’re actually building the next generation of product lines."
Products made under Motorola's new agenda are starting to show up, he added.
Pichette also put speculated growing tensions between Google and Samsung over the latter's dominance of the Android ecosystem down to journalists that "love big headlines that sell newspapers."
"We have a terrific relationship with Samsung, they've been very successful with Android just like the rest of the ecosystem. We welcome all the partners on our Android platform and continue to innovate."
"Our aim is that as many partners continue to benefit. So from that perspective, both Samsung and ourselves, have benefited from Android and Chromebooks."