Motorola chief executive Dennis Woodside is moving from smartphones to cloud storage in March. The 10-year Google executive has announced that he will be working for Dropbox as its chief operating officer by the end of next month.
Woodside will be assisting the expanding cloud storage firm currently helmed by its 30-year-old chief executive Drew Houston. The executive poaching comes after Lenovo's acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $2.95 billion and amid a massive fund injection of as much as $350 million received by Dropbox from Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock and other investors.
"At the end of March I will step down from my post as CEO at Motorola Mobility to join Dropbox as COO. This was not an easy decision to make, but I leave knowing that Motorola is in great hands - now and in the future. I'm excited about what the next chapter in Motorola's storied history will bring under the new ownership of Lenovo. While Google imbued simplicity and software sensibility into the company, Lenovo will bring it the scale it deserves. I have no doubt the two companies together will be a force for good in the mobile industry," Woodside announced his resignation on the Motorola blog.
Google co-founder Larry Page also confirmed the departure of Woodside and said Jonathan Rosenberg and Nikesh Arora, both top executives in the search engine company, will lead the Motorola unit.
"Dennis and the team have reinvented Motorola, with wonderful products like Moto X and Moto G. I wish him all the best with his new big job at Dropbox." said Page.
Woodside, with his experience with a global company, can help the young startup with 200 million customers further expand its customer base. Dropbox is currently valued at $10 billion and will most likely go public in the near future.
"We've long admired Dennis's leadership at Google and Motorola where he ran multibillion-dollar businesses and built amazing organizations around the world. We're so happy to welcome Dennis to our team - I can't imagine a better person to help us bring Dropbox to global scale," said Houston in a statement.
Dropbox, which officially launched in September 2008, offer several pricing tiers for individual and business users ranging from free to $75 per team of five individuals every month. The company boasts that it has 4 million businesses using its services with 97 percent of its clients belonging to Fortune 500 firms. About a billion files are saved on a daily basis to Dropbox.
Woodside wasn't too successful in bringing Motorola back to profitability, but the struggling brand is a different story compared to Dropbox that has been showing great promise since its founding in 2007.
