Motorola Chief Executive Ed Zander said on Wednesday he was fed up with rivals' copying his company's long-flagged product designs and vowed that from now on Motorola would announce products as it shipped them.
Zander said he had been baffled when shortly after joining the world's second biggest mobile phone maker he saw his company announcing cell phones that would not be in the shops until nine months later.
"I was totally amazed. It was January 2004 and we were talking about products for the second half of the year," Zander said in an interview on Wednesday at the 3GSM wireless trade show here.
Zander reckoned that since he was the new guy, and all of Motorola's rivals were doing the same, he would keep quiet.
"Last year, same thing," he said.
"I watched how the competition was copying all our products and that's when Ron Garriques (Motorola's handset chief) and I put our foot down," he said.
Asian rivals like LG and Electronics have come out with their own cell phones that resemble the thin RAZR.
But Motorola is fighting back. From now on it will not announce products until the first models are delivered to customers, Zander said. "We announce when we ship," he said.
He dismissed suggestions that Motorola was taking a cue from Apple whose chief executive Steve Jobs often gets on stage to announce new products, like the iPod music player, and which are available in shops five minutes later.
"All my life in the computer industry we announced when we shipped," said Zander, who joined Motorola over two years ago from computer maker Sun Microsystems.
