Secret sauce behind the success of Moto’s revival (It’s not what you think)

                  The turnaround of Motorola from a money bleeding failed phone maker to a company which now owns six percentage of Europe’s total phone sales last year is nothing short of an unbelievable feat. Everyone from the average Joe to the think tanks behind mega corporate are smoking their heads thinking how they did this. There is no simple answer to this question. Like any other success stories, Motorola is hesitant to tell their secrets. But it’s just a matter of time before someone connects the dots and finds out that. Now let me connect the dots for you.

Googliness..

It all started from Google buying the failing brand. A decision which gave Google lot of pressure from the OEM’s who was licensing its mobile OS, android, and ultimately led to the selling of Motorola to Lenovo. (I will write an article on that later). The move made Google directly competing with its previous partners. It was a no-brainer for the customer to choose Motorola against any other OEM because it would certainly get early access to the latest software from its parent company. Because Google is a cash cow who wants to increase mobile internet traffic and get the personal data from its customers for targeted ads, it could sell these phones for very little margin. And these customers when purchasing or using apps from Playstore would generate revenue to Google later. (This is a tried and tested strategy followed by other successful companies like Xiaomi, Amazon etc.)

It was not just the money from Google which helped Motorola. Google is a data processing machine. It has enough data on its servers such that, if in the future, if some artificial intelligence program (VIKI, skynet) wanted to learn about the world, Google servers would be the best place to begin with. (In fact such programs are already running in the background.)  So, if Google data scientists want to find the most preferred and sought after design, dimension and specs for a 21^st century Smartphone, its merely a couple of clicks away. And the materialization of this fact is the much coveted Moto X. It simply blows away the myth that you want bleeding edge specs to smoothly run android. However it wasn’t much of a commercial success due to the spec driven consumer attitude.

Samsunginess..

I’m sure none of you saw that coming! You would think, “What does Samsung has to do with the success of one of its competitors”. Before jumping into any conclusions, what we need to understand is that Samsung is a multi product company. We all know that apple iphones used and I think, still uses components manufactured by Samsung. Well, coming back to moto, the USP of Moto’s latest phones are the higher than typical benchmark scores they generate, when compared to similarly specked competitors and the fluidity in the UI.

                   We know that benchmarking apps generally give a value by measuring the individual performance of the components. And some of us also know that it is not actually the RAM, it’s the NAND flash that is the bottleneck for android performance. Earlier versions of android were notorious for unnecessary read/writes even while deep sleep. Newer versions have tried to solve this to some extent.

                    Samsung comes into the picture by creating a new file system optimised to work with flash storages. It is called F2FS. Flash Friendly File System was developed by Samsung with flash storage and its working in mind in the initial stages. Well, there is several aftermarket ROM’s with support for this file system, only Motorola is using it currently on production models. And actually this is the reason for the increase in performance which is not seen in its competitors.

             There are other factors also behind the success story, but mentioning everything is beyond the goal of this article. Feel free to comment below on anything that you felt like saying after reading the article.

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