Remember you (or me) are not their clients. The telcos we buy phones from are and they want more models they can push. Also, there are certification issues on different markets. For instance, it's illegal to use an iPhone 5 in Brazil because it wasn't approved by the regulatory agency.
One way Motorola can get around this would be to make the phones more modular, with models differing in peripheral components (keypads, LCDs, cameras), keeping the computing engine consistent and manage building images with component-specific flags.
One way Google could step in to help would be to make less updates to Android core and release more frequent updates of their userland apps (GMail, Maps, Plus etc). I get JB has better rendering performance on current hardware, but I can live without a performance enhancement for a phone I already have if, in return, I get something like Google Now.
And finally, telcos can somehow mitigate the problem by making the phone purchase experience better. If the experience of upgrading a phone were enjoyable, people would do it more often, keep themselves locked in their contracts and just be happy about it.
Remember you (or me) are not their clients. The telcos we buy phones from are and they want more models they can push. Also, there are certification issues on different markets. For instance, it's illegal to use an iPhone 5 in Brazil because it wasn't approved by the regulatory agency.
One way Motorola can get around this would be to make the phones more modular, with models differing in peripheral components (keypads, LCDs, cameras), keeping the computing engine consistent and manage building images with component-specific flags.
One way Google could step in to help would be to make less updates to Android core and release more frequent updates of their userland apps (GMail, Maps, Plus etc). I get JB has better rendering performance on current hardware, but I can live without a performance enhancement for a phone I already have if, in return, I get something like Google Now.
And finally, telcos can somehow mitigate the problem by making the phone purchase experience better. If the experience of upgrading a phone were enjoyable, people would do it more often, keep themselves locked in their contracts and just be happy about it.