Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola is complete, and longtime Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha has stepped down, according to Google CEO Larry Page. Dennis Woodside, a longtime Google executive, is now the new Motorola CEO.
Googles $12.5
billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility is now complete, the search giant
and now hardware maker detailed in a May 22 blog post. And while Google has
said it will run Motorola as a separate business, that doesnt mean all will
remain as-is.
On the same day that the
acquisition became official, Google announced that Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha, who
revived Motorolas mobile device business and has been a vocal advocate for the
Android platform, stepped down from the top position. Google has appointed
Dennis Woodside, a longtime Google employee, as the new CEO of Motorola
Mobility.
Google CEO Larry Page, in
a blog post, said Woodside will ensure a smooth transition for the company.
He added that Woodside has helped build business for Google across the Middle
East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia, and in less than three years as president
of the Americas, helped increase Googles revenue from $10.8 billion to $17.5
billion.
As an Ironman triathlete,
hes got plenty of energy for the journey aheadand hes already off to a great
start with some very strong new hires for the Motorola team, wrote Page.
These new leaders,
immediately joining the Motorola executive team, include Regina Dugan, the
former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); Mark
Randall, formerly of Amazon and Nokia; Vanessa Wittman, who was chief financial
officer of Marsh & McLennan; Scott Sullivan, former head of HR at Visa and
Nvidia; and Gary Briggs, Googles former vice president of consumer marketing.
Several members of the
Motorola Mobility staffIqbal Arshad, Marshall Brown, Fei Liu, Dan Moloney,
Scott Offer, Mark Shockley, Mahesh Veerina and Jim Wickswill retain their
positions.
Page went on to call
Motorola a great American tech company, with a track record of over 80 years
of innovation. Referencing Motorolas StarTAC, the industrys first cell
phone, which at the time seemed tiny, Page added, Its a great time to be in
the mobile business, and Im confident that the team at Motorola will be
creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for
years to come.
Such cheerleading aside,
Google has promised to walk a careful line and not show favoritism to Motorola
over the other handset makers currently supporting its Android mobile platform.
In the past, Google has
worked with device makers on its own branded Nexus devices. Going forward,
however, it plans to work on Nexus devices with at least five manufacturers at
once, The
Wall Street Journal reported May 15.
While the effort could certainly help to further build Android market
shareduring the first quarter, Android
was on 56 percent of the smartphones that shipped worldwide, according to
Gartnerthe move is likely to also help assuage industry fears about favoritism
toward Motorola.
Woodside, in the press
release, offered his first comments as CEO of Motorola.
Motorola literally
invented the entire mobile industry with the first-ever commercial cell phone
in 1983. Thirty years later, mobile devices are at the center of the computing
revolution. Our aim, he continued, "is simple: to focus Motorola
Mobilitys remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful
devices that are used by people around the world.
Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.
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