Word this morning is that the Moto Xoom and Atrix are flops. Sales numbers indicate that the 10-inch Xoom tablet, a would-be iPad 2 killer which stole the show at CES in January, is virtually DOA – and it’s only been on the market for just a few weeks. While we dont know the exact sales figures, Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette told Forbes sales “have been disappointing.” Meanwhile he cut his 2011 revenue outlook for Motorola Mobility (MMI) to $12.8B (down from #13.7B).
There isn’t much surprise here.
One clue: when’s the last time you’ve seen a line-up of starry-eyed Xoom fans at Costco or Best Buy at 4am?
Perhaps Moto should’ve cut supply in half, or at least let it trickle in to stores slowly, one pallet-hauling UPS truck a time.
However, that’s all marketing and operations. Motorola’s bigger problem is with the manufacturer of the operating system that it relies on to power its product. That, of course, would be Google. The great “Honeycomb” or Android 3.0 turns out to be great for the geek-set, but not for mainstream America. Undoubtedly it’s powerful and impressive. That it was denied by engineers is undeniable. Here’s a test. Put an Apple iPad (1 or 2, both are great) next to a Motorola Xoom. Then tap the home button. Compare the start screens. Which looks easier, more fun to use?
The issues for Android Honeycomb run deeper still.
For almost a year now I’ve been crying out loud: Google needs a real answer to iTunes! Not a half-baked piece-meal of disjointed apps that might possibly make-up 20% of iTunes functionality when band-aided together. No – I mean a soup-to-nuts, built-from-the-ground-up, designed-by-aesthetic-perfectionists solution. It will have single touch access to music, movies, podcasts, books, games, and every known piece of Android content under the sun. It will sync across all your devices, magically (i.e. Amazon Whispernet). It will be nice to look at and simple to use. It will be free of course, and have lots of freebies that will ultimately entice consumers to start buying lots and lots of 99-cent apps and $3 movies.
Now… here’s the not-so-amazing twist:
Google and its partners will promote the EXPERIENCE. Not the SPEEDS AND FEEDS (as we used to say back in the day at Cisco).
Hardware specs are great, yes. But middle America wants to play Angry Birds. They want to poke their friends on Facebook. They want to look up a recipe or watch Colbert do his Friday bit. All of that other information — processor speed, memory architecture, multi-tasking — while important is not the reason why the Apple iPad sells like mad. Remember when we discovered the iPad 2 would not have the uber-sexy high-resolution next-gen display? According to some tech sites the sky was falling! I think now we know this didn’t matter to most consumers as many had predicted.
For now Moto can lament its losses and head back to the drawing board. But I think it needs to have a couple of fierce eye-to-eyes with the new CEO of its partner company. Google needs to re-tool its tablet OS, its content strategy and its marketing messaging if it has any hope of catching Apple in the tablet market.
Paging Larry… this little green robot is broken. Come quick.