Motorola to cut 20 percent of its staff, focus on releasing fewer phones

Some big changes are in store for the Google-owned Motorola Mobility, as it's been revealed that the company will be cutting around 20 percent of its jobs and closing down one-third of its 94 offices. According to a report from the New York Times, the layoffs are part of a Google plan to help "reinvent Motorola," and the changes don't stop there. Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside explained that Motorola also intends to stop making low-end products and slash the number of devices it makes in order to focus on a few handsets. The exec went on to say that Moto wants to help make its products more attractive by including features like sensors that identify people in a room by analyzing their voices, better cameras and batteries that'll keep users going for days.

Moving toward a reduced lineup of new devices is something we've been hearing quite a bit lately. HTC said at the start of 2012 that it planned to cut down on the number of phones it released so that it could focus on a handful of "hero" devices, and former Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha also said that Moto planned to release fewer devices this year. If the company does indeed begin churning out a lower number of products, it'll be interesting to see exactly what kinds of phones it can release, especially given CEO Dennis Woodside's statements about features that he'd like to include in upcoming Motorola devices. Do you think this "fewer phones" strategy will work out for Moto?

Via The Verge, New York Times