Motorola Announces Rick Osterloh as New COO (Updated)

Motorola, in a blog post that has since been pulled, announced today that Rick Osterloh has been named President and COO of the company. Up until today, Osterloh was most recently the SVP of Product for the company, which means he helped lead the charge for their “reinvigoration” over the last year with products like the Moto X.

The announcement points out that Osterloh has been with the company for 7 years, leaving an “insider” in house to lead them forward with a pending takeover from Lenovo on the way. As you know, now-former CEO Dennis Woodside stepped aside to take the COO job with Dropbox back in February, shortly after the Lenovo acquisition was announced.

I’m not exactly sure why they pulled the announcement, but we caught the full text of it before they did so.

Update:  The post is now live.

Here is the full announcement:

A Moto insider to lead us forward

We’re excited to announce that Rick Osterloh has been named as President and COO of Motorola Mobility. Rick will assume the role today, reporting to the Motorola Operating Board at Google until the Lenovo acquisition is complete.

Rick is a Silicon Valley veteran and a familiar face across Motorola, where he has been leading all product management and helping to define the ‘go forward’ strategy for the past two years. Rick first joined the company 7 years ago when Motorola acquired Good, and he started Motorola down the Android path while managing product and engineering teams. Between stints here, Rick joined Skype, where he oversaw design and product for more than 250 million monthly users until it was acquired by Microsoft.

Since his return, Rick’s had a key role in the company’s reinvigoration. He’s been a guiding visionary on the entire product front and a passionate advocate for our philosophy to focus everything we do on the consumer experience.

I believe that Rick’s appointment provides the focused leadership and business continuity needed to steer the organization into the future, and I look forward to continuing in my role as Google liaison and advisor to Motorola through the transition period supporting Rick.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Rosenberg