Stardate 20011218.1543 (On Screen): Motorola had a conference call today discussing their current quarter, and the news remains bad. And as usual, the semiconductor group is the darkest spot on a very dark cloud. Some groups actually made money, most notably cellphone handsets, but the semiconductor group is dying fast. Sales are down by half from a year ago, and Moto announced
another 4100 layoffs from that group plus closings of several fabs.
There comes a point where layoffs cause more harm than help, and Moto is long past that point. A year ago August the company had 150,000 employees; a year from now it's scheduled to have about 102 thousand. The effect on morale of a 35% cut cannot be described, but it also cannot be ignored. And the Semiconductor group has taken a disproportionate share of those cuts. (discuss)
In other news, Mac fan sites are abuzz with rumors that Motorola's Semiconductor group is about to release a new version of the PPC which will catch back up with AMD in the compute-power wars (i.e. which will perform competitively on more than just selected Photoshop filters), thus erasing a two year competitive deficit in one stroke.
