IBM veteran scores in Motorola reorg

A year ago From The Register No 87 -- a year ago. Industry-standard survivor Joe Guglielmi has been upsized again, stepping into the shoes (see below for lame joke) of Fred Tucker, who is moving up to become deputy to the Chief Executive Office. Gugliemi brings a wide range of experience (it says here) to his new post as president of ACCES, Motorola's Automotive, Component, Computer and Energy Sector. ACCES contains the Automotive and Industrial Electronics Group, the Component Products Group, the Energy Systems Group, the Motorola Computer Group and the Flat Panel display Division. This on the surface uninspiring empire is actually very important to Motorola, as it groups together key industry areas that the company targets for embedded systems. If embedded systems take off and Motorola's embedded PowerPC and other solutions are to win major slices of the business available, it's key. Guglielmi however has clearly been available for the post for some time. The Motorola Computer Group he headed has quietly slid into ACCES a couple of months back, in a reorganisation preceding the more recent, post-results-bloodbath, reorganisation. MCG under Guglielmi had been originally charged to make PowerPC a major player on the desktop, but failed miserably in that, and the loss of the Mac licence effectively knocked that plan on the head, forcing refocusing on embedded systems instead. Guglielmi had however been promoted to an oversight role in an (even earlier) reorg of MCG that divisionalised it. Before that he'd run Taligent, the object-oriented Apple-HP-IBM JV that didn't make it, and before that he'd been one of Jim Cannavino's (remember him?) stars at IBM. And here comes the joke, patient readers. After some years of favouring OS/2, The Register finally accepted the war was over, and vividly recalls the time it became abundantly clear. IBM OS/2 Tech Interchange in Paris. Guglielmi, the man running the outfit that was the hope for the future, had jumped ship from Taligent to Motorola just before it started, and in the lounge of the New York Hotel, Disneyland Paris, the canned music kept playing "Say it ain't so, Joe please... say it ain't so..." Shoeless Joe. But we love him really. ®