Greg Brown, Motorola CEO, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, says that products will lead Motorola out of the woods.

If the Mobile World Congress is any indicator of where they are starting, they have one helluva hole to get out of.  As many readers most certainly saw first hand, the Motorola booth in Barcelona 2008 looked alarmingly like the Motorola booth in Barcelona 2007.  Most of the phones were knock-offs of previous models (Z10 replacing the Z8, mahogany RAZRs replacing gold or whatever), in stark contrast to what I saw in other booths.

Nokia, Samsung, and SonyEricsson clearly took “market segmentation” to heart, where Motorola seems to be trying to hit all pegs (square, round, whatever) with the same round hammer.  Sure seems to be a case of engineering driving product marketing rather than the other way around.

While the handset side of the business looks stale and overly rigid, the platform side of the business looks to be lacking in leadership.  Other than S60 & BlackBerry, I think Motorola has announced that they are supporting just about every other platform on the market.

Mr. Brown says that they will be refining their software strategy.  They should do this with a machete, not a fine tooth comb.

Many who write about these platforms have deep biases to one technology or another.  At my company we currently develop for Windows Mobile, PalmOS, BlackBerry, Java, S60, UIQ, and the iPhone (those we have announced).  As a mobile consumer software company we have little choice if we want to service the addressable market.  Do I have technical favorites — yes.  But it doesn’t matter if I can’t buyild a sustainable business.  I would prefer to develop, test, and support no more than 3 platforms — plenty enough for technical and market competition.

Most consumers at the point of sale have no idea what operating system is embedded in the handset.  As I have written before, visiting a high street store in the UK, very few of the phones on display actually operated and the feature card never listed the operating system.  Retailers are not stupid people — if they felt that the platform would sell the phone, they would market that feature.

So why on earth does a company like Motorola develop to so many platforms?  Developers really don’t want it.  Consumers don’t care.  I’d be willing to bet that there isn’t that much pricing leverage anymore (since Motorola buys one of everything).

What Motorola should do is rationalize the platforms exposed to their developers and partners (I’d choose Windows Mobile & Java), normalize & abstract the underlying operating system platform (so I don’t care as a developer), partner with your competitors to limit the number of browsers in the market, and bake a “storefront” client into each phone (a la Nokia and SonyEricsson) to make it easy for developers to reach & monetize the market.