We all know that HTC aren’t in a great position right now, they had a bad year last year and they’re even forecasting poor results for Q1 of 2013. There are a few reasons for this decline but, it looks one of the biggest problems they face are marketing and their public image. If you were to tell me the last time you saw an HTC device advertised – either on the TV or the web – you’d have to think long and hard to remember. Samsung, on the other hand, have been killing it when it comes to advertising and there’s certainly nothing wrong with their image right now. As Android becomes bigger and bigger, more and more of us are caring when our devices see the latest update. HTC have been woeful at updating their line of One Series devices and Samsung pretty much unanimously beat them to the punch when updating to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Covering Android news involves a lot of new devices, software updates, cool new apps and games and more but, we rarely stop to think about how our smartphones are made. HTC are a company that make a lot of phones, that’s pretty obvious, and to make a lot of phones you need to have a lot of workers, working a lot of hours. It’s this that has a group of one thousand engineers at the company very unhappy with HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou, and have sent him a strongly worded letter. Of which the following is an excerpt:
… requiring more than a thousand engineers to work 12 hour days according to “responsibility system” without any overtime compensation, for more than a year… which means 1000+ hours of uncompensated overtime per person per year – is extremely unreasonable…
This is pretty much the last thing that HTC needs right now, there’s mounting pressure on the company to try something new, to create something that really stands out from the crowd. HTC’s CEO is under the spotlight more than ever, with HTC floundering the way they are right now and, it’s beginning to look like the writing is on the wall for Mr Chou. I’m not saying that Chou should be given the boot or anything but, with his own company showing distaste for how he’s running the company, it’s not looking good for Peter.
Yesterday, someone on Google+ asked to describe HTC in just one word. I put forward the word: deaf. Countless times have HTC covered their ears to their users demands. Is it Chou that has his ears covered the most? Perhaps.
[Source: MyDrivers]