Bye Bye Moto: Google pulls plug on Motorola Korea Motorola Mobility has followed Taiwanese handset giant HTC out of the South Korean market, as parent company Google looks to streamline its operations and return the business to profitability. The firm said it will be closing “most” of its operations, including R&D and consumer mobile device marketing, with only around 10 per …
So this is how globalisation works: you go into markets where people are willing to do a lot of work, put in a lot of hours, for not a lot of pay. Problem is that after a while the people will start wanting to put in less work, more normal hours, and want more pay. When the tipping point is hit, you then GTFO.
The best part of the article is this though:
"The lay-offs have already hit China, where staff at its Beijing and Nanjing offices protested the cuts in August."
What do they think corporations are? A democracy?
This should be good news for Obama.
Separating development from production actually robs R & D of knowledge and techniques learned of in production. This is a weakness of Apple as illustrated by their V5 scratched back plates.
All smart manufacturers encourage their development people to mingle with the production lines, observing how they do things. At Ford Canada they actually segregated the 'laziest' workers in to a pre-production facility and video-taped their work.
From the observed short-cuts by these 'lazy' workers manufacturing adapted their lines to incorporate these time saving strategies.
Except the jobs that will be "brought home" are the patent lawyers
Motorola was bought for it's patent portfolio, they will keep making handsets while the current models are selling but there's no point in doing R&D on a company that has no future.
The reason for the drop off in Korea is that following the Samsung-Apple spats it's now impossible to do business as an American company in Korea. It would be like buying a Japanese car in America in 1941
It has previously been mentioned here that the first sign of the end for an engineering company is when they fire all the real engineers. NOK has done it as Elop has decided to be an arm of Microsoft. Moto is about to be decimated in the same manner.
The people who destroy engineering companies destroy part of the knowledge base of humanity that took a long time to create. The cost of acquiring that knowledge again is non-trivial.
Bye Bye Moto.
Deduction:
* Companies need to hire good Engineers in order to create good products.
* Good products make companies successfull
* Companies that employ Good Engineers will eventually fail
Moral of the story, don't be an Good Engineer, you wont have to change your jobs so often..
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