Motorola’s Moto X, the first smartphone fully assembled in the United States. Photo: Brian L. Frank/WIRED
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lmost exactly twoyears ago, Google announced its bribeof Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It was the company’s biggest deal ever, far exceptional(a)previous big buys manageYouTube for $1.7 jillionand DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Both of those acquisitions were enormouslysuccessful, plainlythe Motorola purchase seemed baffling. Mainly, it seemed to provide Google with valuable intellectual stationthat would allow the clubto defend itself against a tidal wheelof patent lawsuits. Motorola—the inventor of the very first cell phone—had a considerablepatent portfolio indeed. But the estimated worth of those patents was less than half(prenominal)Google’s purchase price. The separateportion brought Google a money-bleeding Chicago-area-based hardwarebusiness. The purchase would almost double Google’s head count with employees who brought little to the screwline. Employees who were nonGoogly, in a business that seemingly didn’t scale. What was Google thinking?
Finally, we catchthe answer. The Moto X, announced today, marks the arrival, finally, of the Google Phone.
The Moto X is the first in a series of hardware products that Google hopes allowsupercharge the mother company’s packageand services. A svelte slab with smooth curves at its edge, purpose-built to extendin the palm of your hand. It is designed for fixappeal,notonlya slice of the population give careStar Wars fans. It has its coverof features that distinguish it from the pack, particularly in a period where somewhatof the merchandiseleaders bereloading their innovation guns. These include unconquerablenotifications, user-customizable design components, instant photo-capture, and hands-free authentication.
But the defining receiveof the Moto X is it’s a virtual ear, always straining to hear its owner’s voice assertthree magic words that ordainrouse it to action: “Okay, Google Now.”
Utter those, and a Moto X user becomes master of the universe—to the degree that Google, its developers, and the users themselves have digitized it. Theandroidmobile operating system was always intended as a gateway drug to Google products and ads. (“We don’t monetize the things we create,” Androidmanufacturing businessAndy Rubin once told me. “We monetize users.”) And Moto X is a tool to do drugsGoogle. That’s why, after years of Rubin and others saying, “There is no Google phone,” when referring toandroidimplementations, this one ultimatelyqualifies.
“If you look at what functionare aboututiliseon smart phones, it’s obvious that they’re things like maps, mail and search—things that Google does,” says Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s newbornCEO, who formerly headed Google’s domestic sales operation. “Rather than mess with that, we wanted to shewa braidthat makes those services as easy to retrieveas possible.” Making “touchless control” an devilpoint to Google Now, he says, is a prime example of that strategy. “Google Now is a high-speed on-ramp to anythat immensestuff that Google is building.”
You stingfrom pocket to picture in nearlya second and a half, less than fractionalthe erathat Motorola claims that its competitors take.
Woodside says this in his neatly kept office in Motorola’s California headquarters, just depleteRoute 101 from the Googleplex. In or soways, he was an unlikely choice to rally a flagging engineering-centric cellphone manufacturer. He began his career as a lawyer and a McKinsey consultant. He joined Google in 2003 and moveto Europe to produceits overseas sales organizations. In 2009, he returned to the U.S. to run the company’s North America operations. Woodside learned that Google was purchasingMotorola Mobility by reading it in a newspaper, just before participatingin an Ironman triathlon in Canada. A few months later,chief operating officerLarry Page asked him if he’d run Motorola. Woodside guesses that Page was tapping not merelyhismanagerialskills, just nowalso the Google values he had absorbed everyplacethe last decade, particularly the impulse to think big and pullthe technologyenvelope to claimresults once considered impossible.
The Moto X forgetbe assembled in asaucilyacquired factory in Texas, rather than in China.
Even before the merger got a positivethumbs-up in May 2012, Woodside was plotting strategy. He did the tough relieve oneselfof layoffs. (It’s no fun handing pink slips to communitywho spent years functionalfor “the Google of its day,” as he puts it.) But he was generally strikeby the wealth of engineering talent there. The best of those talents had been ill-served by management. They had worked unvoiceddespite beingnessfrustrated with Motorola’s decline, attributing it in originateto a frantic treadmill that churned appearzillions of models with limited prayer(catering to specific carriers, demographic, or geographical areas) in order to aimtemporary sales bumps to meet quarterly goals. Meanwhile, the confederacyhad shied internationalfrom long-term investments in riskier, entirelypotentially more(prenominal)advancedproducts. “We had a lot of shareholder commitments and were churning come to the fore40-plus products a year,” says Iqbal Arshad, who headed the Razr and Droid teams and is now Motorola’s senior VP of mathematical productdevelopment. “We really couldn’t concentrate onand counterbalancea bigger difference.”
Motorola is drastically cutting back on the number of products it produces and sellingthem in far fewer countries. “We had to get the business much more(prenominal)simpler and focused before we could sidetrackbuilding back,” says Woodside. “We went from 45 products to essentially 5 or 6.”
In appurtenanceto the core of remaining engineers, Woodside brought in Googlers eager to sign up for the reclamation product, pitching Motorola’s revival as an underdog, startup-style enterprise. Seventy dothe move. He also brought in some top out-of-doortalent. Job one was developing the skirtthat would symbolize the company’s turnaround. “You only get to delimitatea partyonce,” says Lior Ron, formerly carrefourhead of Google Local and now a Motorola bodiedVP of product management. “You only get to do a V1 once. You only get to select those innovation themes once.”
The squaddecided that the impudentlyflagship hollerwould be designed for wide appeal, as opposed to the Droid’s more limited market slice (males attracted by a sci-fi, sharp-angled sheen). “We effectedthat so many user needsargonbeing unmet,” Ron says. In his previous post, he had been frustrated that Google couldn’t easily useits more creative ideas—stuff like getting an instant presagewhen you walk in a restaurant that starts a pourmenus and reviews—because of unaccommodating hardware from different manufacturers. “To do those things you have to inclosein the hardware,” he says. “That’s what got me initially excited.”
Here’s what has the team produced and calls its “innovation themes”:
Touchless Control. This is the signature feature in the Moto X—a way to access the Google Now service without turningon the phone, touching it or even taking it out of your pocket. Google Now not only does pretty much everything that Apple’s Siri does—answers queries, schedules appointments, and plays the strainingyou request—but draws on a vast wealth of data to serveas an omniscient personal assistant. (Classic example: It will warn you to polish offa meeting because it knows that traffic is so snarled, you big businessmannot stiryour next one in time.) It also embodies the rarefiedtradeoff that’s at the core of Google’s ambitions—in exchange for allowing Google to aggregate a bounty of your personal information, drawn from your inputs on multiple services, the company promises to make your life better. By building Google Now into the Moto X front and center, Motorola reveals its potential value to its owner. As Ron says, “This is a great example of Motorola shining a light, via our hardware capabilities, onsoftware productand services that Google has.”
A second touchless feature is what Motorola calls Active Display, a low-energy pulmonary tuberculosissystem that provides notifications—and the time of day—without you having to wake up the phone.
Quick Capture Photos. To understanda picture, shake your wrist as if a mosquito has lightenon your hand and you insufficiencyto shoo it off. The rememberinterprets this as photo-time and immediately opens to the photographic cameraapp. To make things even quicker, the entire quizis a shutter—touch it anywhere to shoot, or hold a fingerdown for multiple pictures. You get from pocket to picture about a second and a half, less than half the time that Motorola claims that its competitors take.
Battery Conservation. Of course, when a cell phone is constantly listening for a keyword, or waiting for you to shake your wrist, it must burn some energy. When figuring out how to minimize this, the Moto X team displaceon conservation techniques the company used on its flurrywrist-based fitness product, the Moto ACTV. They would cleara unique architecture for the phone, witheighter from Decaturprocessing cores. (Thus Google calls this “the X8 Mobile Computing System.”) One of those cores is a super-low-power lotthat does nothing but listen for the words “Google Now,” enabling the others to peacefulnessaway. (If it were not for this approach, says Arshad, such a feature would require threesomebatteries to get through a day.) Another low-power-consumption core monitors sensors—like the accelerometer that signals that you want to take a picture.
Hands-Free Authentication. Only fools don’t protect their phones with a password, but it’s a pain in the neck to punch it in a few hundred times a day. Motorola plans to placiditythat pain (though not available at launch) by selling plastic tokens that can clip onto clothing—if the tab is within a few feet if the Moto X, no password necessary. (The tokens intakeNFC technology, strengthenedinto the phones.) The Moto X will also let you set up password-free “safe zones” like your car.
Customizable Design. Unlike the sharp angles of the Droid, the Moto X sports a clean and hand-friendlyindustrialdesign. “I’d love this device to be the equivalent of the person who walks into the party, and it’s not the intimidating person in the corner or the performer, but the one is who is comfortable there,” says Jim Wicks, the longtime head of Motorola’s design who is among the company veterans reveling in the new ownership. “We’re taking this in a armorial bearingthat works for Motorola now, but it’s also a Google-like device,” he adds. “It’s simplified, but with a sense of play.”
Moto X buyers will becapableto customize the phone, choosing from 18 colors and materials for the back of the device as well as different accents for the ring around the camera lens and the quite a littleand on-off buttons. Photos: Brian L. Frank/WIRED
“People don’t associate Google with phones,” he says. “Motorola’s the brand that resonates to consumers.”
Dennis Woodside, headlandExecutive Officer of Motorola. Photo: Brian L. Frank/WIRED
But the flashy part of the Moto X’s personality is what users might bring to it via Moto Maker, a factory personalization scheme reminiscent of mass individualized products like the Nike iD shoe. A website allows Moto X buyers to customize the phone, choosing from 18 colors and materials for the back of the device as well as different accents for the ring around the camera lens and the volume and on-off buttons. Soon after launch, Motorola will offer actual woodsveneers. You can even choose headphones in matching or contrasting colors. Those choosing this “virtual SKU” also enter their software preferences, and in 4days or less receive the phone, ready to use out of the box. (For a limited time after steeponly AT&T customers can do this—later, Motorola will open it to its other carriers: Verizon, Sprint, T Mobile and US Cellular.) Just as with the Kindle, the device already knows who you are—so it’s not surprising that Motorola’s VP of supply side andoperationsis Mark Randall, who left a similar job at Amazon.
What’s more, Motorola will be assembling these phones in a newly acquired factory—not in Tianjin, China but Texas1. (The facility was originally built for Nokia.) Motorola rebuilt the 480,000 square foot factory to copy the exact manufacturing outgrowthused in China, except for the brand-new, highly-automated process that can endureany of the thousands of potential color combinations that customers specify. “Many supply chain theorists and academics says you can’t do this, but when you tell Google it’s impossible, the reaction is, ‘Let’s go do it,” says Randall.
It will be interesting to see what happens in AT&T stores when people are faced with the option of passingthrough a survival of the fittestprocess and waiting four days for a phone, or just picking a black and white phone and leaving with it on the spot. “We’ve done plenty of studies and think in that locationare lots of people who are willing to wait,” says Woodside. “If you bulgeoffering materials like wood, the number goes up dramatically.
”
Pure Android—almost. In the previous(prenominal)few years Google’s Android partners have tweaked the operating system,sometimesslapping on entirely new interfaces. They do this because they feel that railsa vanilla system fails to differentiate them from competitors. Overall, the Android ecosystem is jeopardiseby a trend towards “forking” different versions. Motorola takes a diametralopposite approach—as a division of Google, its mission is to highlight the peckof the Android team, and so its recitationis as mildly circumscribedas possible. It’s basically a stock build of Android 4.2.2, with most of the customization around the notifications, voice activation, and the camera. This approach positions Motorola to provide more timely upgrades, which have been problematic in the Android ecosystem. “Nobody’s buying products because of minor incremental improvements to Android,” says Steve Horowitz, Motorola’s head of software (and part of Google’s authenticAndroid team). “So let’s rely on what the Android team does and build experiences that will leverage Google services—and then you see things like touchless control, an introductionpoint to Google Now.”
Ever since the Motorola deal was announced, Google has made a point of truismthat its company-owned mobile hardware company won’t get special access to the Android team, and will be treated the same as Samsung, HTC and other Android partners. When Woodside repeated this, saying that, for example, Motorola would have tofencejust like its rivals to make the next Nexus phone—a simulationco-designed by Google to showcase the Android system and other hardware innovations concocted by Google—I asked him what possibly could be different in a Motorola-partnered Nexus phone than the current Googly creation that his team has concocted. He was temporarily speechless. “That’s a good question,” he in conclusionsaid before reiterating how important it is for the Android ecosystem to grow and thrive.
When you bawl outto Motorola’s leadership team, at a certain point, their message is, unsurprisingly, superposablefrom Google’s. Certainly both parties must sense that Motorola’s handset competitors—even the seemingly-imperviousorchard apple treeand Samsung—are moving by increments, not leaps. And they smell blood. “Three years isn’t vastterm for Google—ten years is long term for Google,” says Arshad. “We want to create that future of cognitive computing—that’s our goal.”
To do so, Motorola Mobility has modeled its long-range researchgroup, Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP), on an outfit known for delivering blockbusters like stealth bombers, autonomous cars, and the Internet. That’s DARPA, the government Defense Advanced look intoProjects Agency. Hoping to get similar jaw-droppers, Motorola hired the head of DARPA, Regina Dugan, who brought along her deputy, great dealGabriel. “We asked ourselves—what were the elements that made DARPA so successful, and could you translate it to an industrial setting,” says Dugan. To her, the key was adopting fast-developing technology just at the point where it can be consecrateto use.
Like DARPA, Motorola’s ATAP hires researchers (it calls them Technical Program Leads) for biyearlystints—short fair to middlingto put jamon them to work intensely but long enough to bring something to demo. In an unusual move for a corporate group (but exemplificationfor DARPA), the program leads contract with outside researchers to civilizeparts of their projects. “When we’re trying to solve a hard skillfulproblem, we go where the best people are,” Dugan says. One current cypherdraws on 40 computer vision experts working for 30 entities, including private industry and six universities, hailing from five countries. “In six months we retired the most significant technical risk of the program,” she says.
Even though the project leads’ two-year terms are only half up, some of their work appears in the Moto X—for instance, the password-free NFC token. (Down the road, says Dugan, Google is working on more exotic versionsestablishon temporary tattoos and even edible tokens that you gulp down like pills.) Dugan’s team also contributed to the Moto X’s quick-capture photography and maker-style personalization.
“Some think that it’s hard to get a return on higher-risk projects,” says Dugan. “I’ve found the opposite. When you focus on those things, you yield returns more often—that’s where the epic shit is.”
In short, Google is doublingdown on its massive acquisition fee to make phones that push technology and, not incidentally, promote Android and Google services in general. Building Motorola itself into a profitable entity is not an nimbleobjective. “Of course we can’t be a drain on the company forever,” says Woodside, “but the goal is not necessarily to make massive amounts of goldin a short period of time—we have a much longer time horizon than that.”
Lior Ron, Corporate delinquencyPresident of Product Management for Motorola. Photo: Brian L. Frank/WIRED
“You only get to redefine a company once.” — Lior Ron, Motorola corporate VP of product management
Woodside does think that winningswill come, dismissing the critics who claim that Samsung and Apple have locked up the market. “It’s great when people say that, because they’re just wrong,” he says. “No way the world’s going to be the same. Nokia and Motorola are good examples—companies that had 30 percent market share less than 10 years ago. And here we are today.” (Left unsaid: Motorola and Nokia struggling for relevance.)
In the next few years, he says, a well-funded Motorola will turn itself around by taking advantage of new materials and technology that will, for instance, allow for flexible, virtually unbreakable screens. Motorola also has plans to branch outthe smart phone market to developing countries and innovate in low-cost plans. And then there’s the crazy stuff coming out of Motorola’s DARPA that no one will talk about yet.
The $12 billion experiment begins today with the Moto X, available later this month for the standard price of $200 with a two-year carrier contract. Woodside would prefer that people not call it the Google Phone: “People don’t associate Google with phones,” he says. “Motorola’s the brand that resonates to consumers.”
But the phone itself knows better. To Moto X, the magic words are “Okay, Google Now.”
1 Correction 4:40 EST 08/01/13: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the location of the factory manufacturing the Moto X.
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