Lance Ulanoff on Motorola’s Introduction of the Cliq

Lance Ulanoff:

Motorola Co-CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha commanded the stage well. He was reading, obviously, but it came off fairly naturally. So it’s hard to account for the disconnect that followed. Jha began the announcement part of his speech by talking about MotoBlur. To be precise, he talked about what MotoBlur could do, but never specifically said exactly what it was. He called it a “solution” but that could still easily be a phone. In fact, he showed an image of a phone no one had seen before on a big screen behind him and explained how MotoBlur manages all your contacts and even aggregates them all into a master contact database. He said MotoBlur can also handle your social interactions and give you a customizable, widget-based interface so you could have instant access to the things most important to you.

For a full 5 minutes, I thought the name of the new phone was the MotoBlur. Wrong.

Beware conceptual fuzziness.

★ Friday, 11 September 2009