"More wood behind fewer arrows."

That's the phrase Larry Page used to describe Google's recent shut down of underperforming products. Stop flooding the market with crap, and focus on fewer, higher quality products. Now it seems Motorola has somehow gotten the exact same idea.

AllThingsD reports that Motorola "plans to release fewer new models this year, in an effort to concentrate its marketing dollars." I hope they are concentrating their design, polish, and update efforts too.

Motorola's release schedule since they jumped on the Android train has been absolutely insane. Their 2011 US product lineup looked something like this:

Droid 3

Droid Bionic

Droid RAZR

Atrix

Atrix 2

Admiral

Electrify

Droid X2

Photon

XPRT

Titanium

Triumph

DEFY+

CLIQ 2

Xoom

Xoom Family Edition

Droid XYBOARD 10.1

Droid XYBOARD 8.2

Now this list is in no way definitive, but it should give you an idea of the crazy incremental one upmanship Motorola has been betting on. Oftentimes full-on sequels of phones would come out 6 months after the originals.

This pace of releases has caused all kinds of problems. On the consumer side, it's lead to a confusing market, terrible update support, and hesitant consumers, convinced that their new phone will be obsolete in 3 months. I bet it's a headache for Motorola too, doing updates and bugfixes on 20 different builds of Android sounds daunting, to say the least.

HTC also recently committed to slowing down their release schedule, and the new phone lineup at CES is no where near the level of last year's. We'll have a clearer picture after Mobile World Congress in February, but hopefully this is a trend toward more polished and well supported products. Less phones means more resources to throw at updates and polish.

Let's hope.

Source: AllThingsD