Motorola: You can’t go home again

The Motorola ROKR phone has quickly become the stuff of legend. Launched as the first real convergence of entertainment and culture — music and telephony — the implementation of iTunes has all but been drowned in the hysterical hype of the iPod Nano and the new iPod with video.

Motorola chief Ed Zander had this to say in a post-earnings announcement interview reprinted in Bloomberg:

“We got off to a little bit of a rough start,” Zander said in an interview after Motorola reported on Oct. 18 that third- quarter profit tripled, driven by more-popular phones such as the Razr. “People were looking for an iPod and that’s not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there.”

We may have missed the marketing message… And therein lies the challenge of marketing consumer products today: if you mess up once, it’s over. You’ve lost. Back to the drawing board. Your new wife will love you for not knowing the mistakes you’ve made before.

Zander claims they’re out to fix these problems, though with handheld shelf-life at less than a year, they’re already well behind the 8-ball. Apple, on the other hand, appears to have learned a valuable lesson here. In launching the widely anticipated sequel to the full-sized iPod, the released … another full-sized iPod. It’s not the iPod Video. It’s not the iVid. It’s just … another iPod. It’s an iPod that just so happens to support music, photos, and a very limited range of video.

While Motorola was out to market convergence, the public expected a full-featured phone and full-featured iPod-in-one, which was neither the experience or the intent of the ROKR. It’s a phone — a phone with really swanky ring-tones.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried the ROKR. It sucks. I can say confidently that if I’d purchased it with my own money, I would have returned it, too.

Today’s October 25, and the new iPod (which supports music, photos, and a very limited range of video but is decidedly not the iPod video) is going into wide release today and from the looks of it around the net, the response has been extremely positive. There are already a number of applications out there supporting conversion of your video (even DIVx!) to iPod-compatible h.264 or mpeg-4 formats. And with it, with the popularity and the rabid word-spreading machine of iPod owners everywhere, convergence has moved in a new direction.