Motorola, “MOTOBLUR will not be our focus going forward”

Motorola Co-CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha blurred the future of MOTOBLUR last week when he said his company would not focus on the custom user interface skin for Android going forward.

During Motorola’s Q2 2010 earnings call, an analyst noted that the company had stopped advertising and promoting the custom UI and asked what the future of the brand was through the end of the year. Dr. Jha responded that it was hard to convey the value of MOTOBLUR in a 30-second ad spot and his company would focus more on their products and not on MOTOBLUR as a brand name.

This strategy of not focusing on MOTOBLUR was recently seen with the launch of the Droid X on Verizon. The device still featured Motorola’s custom Android skin, but there was no mention of the MOTOBLUR brand anywhere.

It has been rumored that the next major release of Android, codenamed Gingerbread, would make custom skins pointless so this could be one reason why Motorola has made the decision to phase out MOTOBLUR. Motorola worked closely with Google on the release of Android 2.0 and they could be doing the same for Android 3.0, so we should pay attention to these comments and see what develops.

Overall, I doubt anyone is really going to miss MOTOBLUR if it actually disappears and I think Motorola knows this. Most of the original functionality has been duplicated by native features found in Android 2.x, so it only doubles the work of Motorola who has to constantly update their software to be compatible with the latest and greatest version of Android.

What do you think of Motorola’s decision to focus less on MOTOBLUR and more on actual products? Will you miss the custom skin in future phones or praise Motorola for making the cut?

“With MOTOBLUR, we have found that being able to convey the value proposition around MOTOBLUR is not an easy thing to do in a 30-second ad spot. We have decided that we will focus on the value proposition of products and not MOTOBLUR as a brand name in its own right. MOTOBLUR continues to be important and I think you will see increased functionality in MOTOBLUR. This notion of push-Internet is going to be very important to us, but as a brand name, which we make matter in front of consumers as a brand name, I don’t think that’s going to be our focus going forward, but we see the experiences that we deliver is being relevant and differentiating us.”

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