No experience with consumer electronics. No experience with hardware manufacturing. No experience with industrial design. No experience with manufacturing physical objects.

I'll take small bets on this being basically an interim appointment, lasting less than 2 years.

Page & Brin were perfect people to start Google. As computer science PHD candidates, they had lot of experience in rising capital, starting a business, building massive datacenters, writing applications that run on thousands of computers, managing large software teams, rapidly scaling a company from a few people to thousands etc.

Oh no, wait, they didn't.

BTW: even Steve Jobs didn't personally operate injection-molding machines or designed CAD models. He's the CEO, not an industrial designer.

That is a good point, and while running a startup is completely different than stepping into a billion-dollar corporation, the argument is still valid. Here are a couple examples from recent years:

   Who            On Paper         Reality
   -----------------------------------------------------------
   Steve Jobs     Hippy kid        F**kin best CEO of our time
   Alan Mulally   Normal engineer  Ford's savior

   John Sculley   Perfect fit      Drove Apple into the ground
   Carol Bartz    CEO material     Need I explain?
   Léo Apotheker  Good enough      Yeah, right.

FYI on Leo: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/business/voting-to-hire-a-...

But yea, I have been thinking about looking for CEOs from alternate sources like the startup world for a while now if hiring externally.

I'm pretty sure the Google board knew all this. They obviously looked deeper at the guy's track record and personally interviewed him several times.

They should recruit Bob Mansfield (Apple SVP iphone hardware) or one of his deputies and give them complete autonomy. Bringing the Google design touch to Motorola is not the answer.

>Bringing the Google design touch to Motorola is not the answer.

Given two weeks with my Droid 4, I'm going to have to disagree with this. The phone is great on the whole, but almost everything I dislike about it is where Moto veered from vanilla Android. Things like Facebook sync and manually connecting to an Exchange were broken out of the box.

To be honest, I went ahead and bought the phone primarily because of the impending Google acquisition. I'm making a calculated wager that Google will have Moto push a closer to stock build of ICS at the least, and unlock the bootloader in the best case scenario.

Yeah, the best and first thing this guy should do is kill motoblur.