Good Technology - The redheaded step child

On Tuesday Motorola announced that it will be selling its Good Technology unit to Visto. Although not predicted, this news is not a complete shock. While Good had some scalability problems that put the platform at a disadvantage, what I think ultimately lead to the failure of the Good platform is Motorola's inability to support it with a strong integrated enterprise offering. Good became the redheaded step child of Motorola's enterprise business.

Motorola made two significant acquisition in the enterprise mobility space over the past few years, Symbol and Good. The Symbol deal was $3.9 billion compared to the Good deal valued at just $400 million. The Symbol deal was not only much bigger the company was a better fit as Symbol is predominantly a device company, unlike Good. I think the Good deal was overshadowed by Symbol.

Part of the rational for the Good acquisition was to compete with RIM. Unfortunately, Motorola's continued failure to provide compelling devices that could compete with RIM put Good at a competitive disadvantage.

Without a quality consumer grade smart phone to help drive demand for the Good e-mail platform, Good was forced to piggy back on and try to integrate with Symbols application platform. The Symbol platform never really experienced much success given that Symbol is really a device company and the platform was rather expensive. By addressing Symbols market, Good technology was also out of its element selling to blue collar and gray collar customer's where e-mail may not be the primary application and devices operate in a less connected environment.

Now that Good Technology has found a new home with Visto, hopefully what is left of the company will be happy. Visto is a wireless e-mail firm with limited exposure to the enterprise market. The acquisition of Good should help them bolster their offerings in this market.

What have we learned:
1) In tough times companies will focus on core competencies. Motorola focuses on devices while Visto does e-mail. We should see more of this refocusing.
2) RIM owns the enterprise e-mail market. IT people love RIM. Both Motorola and Nokia have figured this out. I think that the only way to beet RIM in the enterprise is through the consumer. Visto may have a shot at this but it will be tough.
3) To be successful in mobile software you need a robust and integrated ecosystem.