Jha was just as impressed with Osterloh’s unit.
“Very quickly, I figured out they knew how to write software,” Jha said. “It felt like a team that would execute.”
In the weeks after, as Jha scrutinized Motorola’s other product groups, he often had the opposite reaction. At another meeting that ran late into the night, he discovered that the group making phones with Nokia’s Symbian operating system was staffed almost entirely by outside contractors. The entire project appeared to lack coordination and it was constantly months late in delivering phones.
Jha soon decided to axe the entire Symbian product line as well as phones using several other operating systems. He wanted to simplify product development to standardize on one or two core systems. It came down to a Microsoft Windows mobile operating system and Android. When Microsoft said that a crucial release of its mobile operating system would be delayed, Jha gave Microsoft the stiff arm and bet on Android.
Last fall, Jha received an e-mail from Verizon, asking for ideas for a “long ball play for the fourth quarter” of this year, Jha said. That meant a smartphone that could take on the iPhone. He flew to the carrier’s headquarters in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, bringing with him models of several of the company’s latest designs. Verizon executives seemed partial to one thin, angular handset that had been designed in London. Even without a firm order, Jha immediately assigned Iqbal Arshad, who had been the project manager for the Verizon version of the Razr, to transform the mockup into a smartphone Verizon could sell a year later.
“Sanjay said, ‘Burn the ships and focus on Android,’” Arshad recalled.
That meant rearranging the existing, tightly packed interior to accommodate the larger chips needed to connect to Verizon’s network. Meanwhile the phone’s overall design needed to be exciting enough to go head-to-head with the iPhone.
They found a way to fit a slide-out keyboard into a phone that was only 1.5mm thicker than the iPhone. And they used a 3.7-inch touchscreen, noticeably bigger than the 3.5-inch screen on the iPhone. To take advantage of the higher resolution of that screen, Motorola, working with Google, developed new software that would support high-definition video and 3-D graphics.
Analysts at the launch on Wednesday said that the Droid, which will be backed by the biggest ad campaign by Verizon Wireless and sell for US$199 this week, is a crucial milestone in Motorola’s recovery.
“To be able to come out with a sexy flagship device that is getting so much promotion from Verizon and really shows off their hardware skills — it looks like their bet on Android is going to pay off,” said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis. “If they hadn’t delivered something like this, they’d be out of business.”
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