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Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes?
An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNET the once almighty Motorola is going to split into two companies, 'If the split goes through as planned, what will remain will be the "broadband and mobility solutions" business, which includes enterprise mobility, government and public safety, and Motorola's home and networks divisions.' Engadget claims to have an insider's email that details where it all went wrong, paying particular attention to mismanagement at the highest levels. What makes all of this even more of a shame though is that Motorola's latest product lineup seems to be receiving critical acclaim but with the company in so much termoil, will it ever rise out of the ashes?"
Moto split up in the 90s, 3com swallowed them. You might remember the bit sufer modems of the time that all support was dropped from.
The second split in 10 or 15 years.
The problem with Moto is that they were always good at engineering, but not good at asthetics. Now they are good at asthetics, and sometimes engineering.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
WTF do critics know? It's what the market wants that counts.
Moto has stood the test of time, can't quite see them falling off the radar now.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
In researching the myriad claims raised in this letter -- which we believe to be true -- we also discovered a number of other unsettling things about Motorola's corporate past in the last five years, such as certain gross corporate excesses demanded by Zander and his inner circle (like a small fleet of extravagant private jets, where most companies that size might only have one, if any), or the fact that Motorola's current CEO, Greg Brown, is so technologically out of touch he refuses to use a computer for communications, and has all his email correspondences printed by his secretary and replied to by dictation.
The sad thing is that this is way too common in American corporations today. Someone much smarter than I(I think it was in the Economist) remarked that the modern day American CEO doesn't get to the top because they have vision for great products, they get to the top because they are connected and are great at playing financial games. This makes for great short term gains at the expense of any sort of longevity(but by that point the CEO has his golden parachute and is long gone). Carl Icahn also lamented at how woefully out of touch the modern American CEO is, and how much their exorbitant salaries and total lack of accountability and vision make American companies so topheavy they are quickly becoming uncompetitive.
Motorola thought that it could farm everything out and somehow just sit back and reap the benefits of others labor. It was wrong, and yet others are lining up to jump off the same cliff that they leapt from....
Monstar L
some kind of new exciting alternative energy product? If we could merely tap the termoil produced by 10 American CEOs we would have enough energy in a year to power all the neon signs of Tokyo and Shanghai for decades to come!
Monstar L
But so what?
In the US market, consumers have taken it as given that whatever interesting features a manufacturer builds into its hardware, the carriers will either disable them outright or make them into carrier-branded pay-per-use features.
Camera? Pseudo-GPS location services? Directions/navigation? Local restaurants? Even something as simple as using your PC's desktop wallpaper as a background image is pay-per-use. Web browser? Nope, pay-per-byte. Music/Video? Nope, browse your carrier's licensed pile of top 40 crap. Better mic/speaker for actually making phone calls? Nope, it's all compressed down to underwater-quality-burbling by the carriers anyway.
This situation isn't unique to Motorola; carrier lockdown has made wireless phones a commodity, and has threatened all manufacturers. What's the difference between a Motorola ABC or a Nokia XYZ when every potential differentiating feature has been disabled by every carrier?
It's yet another classic case of a complete lack of management and leadership, way too much politics and a complete lack of understanding of what products they're selling and how they're produced. The products were actually there, and the people (one who sadly passed away), to achieve success were there, but it's been squandered. They're not the first, and they won't be the last. The management and executives at Motorola are, and were, incompetent losers, and that's the label they carry and the price that they pay for those golden parachutes.
Desperate measures such as the breaking up of a business is always a big indication that no one has a clue what to do and that people who don't understand what the business does have taken over.
It was obvious to me when Apple announced the iPhone that MOTO was going to have a problem on its hands in very short order. Although the pricing made it unaffordable for Joe Sixpack, it was immediately apparent that Apple had, at a single stroke, completely redefined the cell phone experience. Every mobile product that was more than eight months from release should have been killed immediately, and all the freed up personnel should have then stared at the iPhone demo video for two weeks straight until the UI principles became ingrained. New design ideas could have then flowed out of that. It could even have been done inexpensively.
Had they done that last year, they would have had new prototypes to show by now, they could have started generating buzz, and could have remained relevant. Now, it will take a hugely expensive effort to keep the division -- possibly the entire company -- afloat.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Moto split up in the 90s, 3com swallowed them.
Fact check please.
Ah, but it was said with such certitude...
I am convinced that Index tracker funds are evil.
These funds only attempt to match a particular index, so they have no reason to invest resources to to maximise the profits of companies that they own (or rather, to prevent abuses that reduce stockholder value). Resources to work with companies that they hold cost money and these funds try to match the indix as closely as possible with minimum overhead.
Hence, there are large stockholdings in the hands of entities that really don't care. That's part of the reason boards get away with compensation and benefit packages for execs that are abusive towards the shareholders.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
For my money, Motorola can't go bankrupt fast enough, and I hope they manage to take Sprint/Nextel down with them when they go. I've suffered through three versions of Motorola's Nextel "ruggedized" phones:
The "i1000 plus" flip phone where the most gentle use would irreparably break the flip cover (which was not available to the service centers as a repair part)
The "i58sr" which had no screws holding its boards together (so required a weekly drop to the floor to reseat the connectors inside) and made such a loud "BEEP" in your ear when Nextel dropped a call (i.e. constantly) that I threw one through a car windshield. I had people across the room turn their heads and say "Ouch" when the thing would make that sound - I suspect it permanently damaged my hearing. Nextel's service people disavowed any knowledge of the beeping, and referred one to Motorola. Motorola said that nobody had ever reported this problem before, but then acknowledged that they had no actual way to know if anyone had ever actually done so, since they had no bug tracking or ticketing system (I used to call in about once a month to see if they'd fixed it yet). Finally a Motorola guy said that it was definitely a problem, but that Nextel had insisted they add the beep to let users know the calls were dropped, then told the service people to lie about it.
The "i315" with a smaller screen than the i58sr, but the same text strings in the firmware (so most of the menu items are wider than the screen and are only visible with line scrolling). The developers seemed to have gone through the firmware and deleted any items which were actually useful, such as "Alarm Clock", while adding a digital unit-to-unit radio which only works if you have the cell phone and walkie-talkie functions _disabled_ - a.k.a. a completely useless feature which never made it to other handset models.
At this point in my life, I wouldn't take a Motorola product - ANY Motorola product - if they paid me to take it - and Nextel has tried repeatedly. (I remember some poor Sprint telemarketer bravely going through her script offering me more and more Motorola junk as I told her more and more how much I despised all things Motorola and Nextel.)
The minute the FIC FreeRunner is available, I'll toss Motorola and Sprint/Nextel to the curb and never look back. And I'm just a _cellphone_ user - imagine the poor police/fire/rescue folks who are stuck with Motorola digital radios which don't work inside buildings, and which automatically deplete their batteries if they also carry a cellphone...
-- No No No NO, Don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to. - Buckaroo Banzai
Motorola still sells more RAZR handsets than the iPhone. The problems are with the executives inability to turn unit sales and revenue into net profit, plus a perceived (likely accurate) lack of vision for the future of all of the pies they have their fingers dipped into.
As soon as losses were reported this year, the stock started its downward spiral. Although frankly, this also reflects modern business that caters to stock more than sustainability (or the comfort of resting on your past success), where any company is only as good as their latest quarter.
It's certainly not the first time a tech company was mismanaged into the ground despite a healthy position in the market.
Seriously, Motorola would be trivial to turn around. I could manage it in a fraction of the time it would take most executives to, and I'm cheap at the price. So could many geeks who have a similarly broad-based background and no patience with waffling. (Waffling should be left to waffle irons.)
Of course, no geek capable of running Motorola will ever be offered the job. We're far too outspoken, way too radical, most (myself included) have never been contaminated with a Harvard business degree, and most (again myself included) have managed to avoid managerial roles because we can't stand having zombies as co-workers. (Holy water supersoakers aren't enough.
Motorola won't hire anyone dangerous enough to succeed. And this is a mission where you need someone who is dangerous, a wildcard, unpredictable. You don't hire a banker to pull off a commando raid, you don't hire a businessman to rescue a disintegrating corporate giant. If they had any sense, they'd be looking for a troublemaker. They WANT Motorola to cause trouble. Causing trouble means they're still breathing. This troublemaker must be able to come up with novel, irrational, but totally brilliant solutions to the current engineering problems. Only problem is, The Doctor doesn't like being pinned down like that.
There is one other option, which has a better chance of success. Start a new company, a company that, businesswise, should logically not exist, that makes no sense given current attitudes, but sells like nothing else. Then openly and outright offer each and every (decent) engineer at Motorola the option of jumping ship. Don't buy the IP, buy the workforce. What's Motorola going to do? Sue each person individually over non-compete? And will the courts even listen to such a case if Motorola isn't producing anything worth a damn to compete with? Yes, it's playing with fire, but look at every single brilliant engineer, every single brilliant company owner, anyone who has ever truly risen far enough above the masses to see anything worthwhile - they all played with fire, in the most insane and dangerous ways possible. And they made it work for them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If Six Sigma can do this for Motorola, imagine what it can do for your company!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I work with mobile phones by profession, and can tell you this isn't true.
What is NOT crippled, with rare exceptions:
- Any phone that supports SD cards will allow the user to use anything except applications and themes from that SD card. My personal Motorola phone's ringtone resides on an SD card.
- USB cables are another backdoor, and many manufacturers put the enabling software on their website. You can also get USB+software combos from Radio Shack for $20 for virtually any device. Some carriers provide roughly the same software/cables for a bit more. (d'oh...)
- None of the J2ME devices block web installation of unsigned apps. (* see below for exceptions)
What IS crippled, depending on the carrier:
- Some carriers prevent installing unsigned network apps, and make unsigned HTTP apps a pain to use. (i.e. Google Maps)
- Themes, which are a bit more complex than simple single files like PNG's and mp3's.
- BREW devices don't let users install their own apps.
I'm not defending these practices, just putting them in perspective.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
I think there were few major problems with Motorola: 1) going everywhere, but ending nowhere, and 2) lately trying to find a hit product instead of churning out good products.
Now you might be asking what I mean by saying going everywhere, but ending nowhere. Well simple, Motorola always had more than one technology always in production and in planning. In operating systems front they first went to Symbian, then started their Linux project and in the same embraced Windows Mobile. Now compare this to Nokia that just concentrated to Symbian, no Linux, no Windows Mobile. Only lately Nokia has introduced Linux based Internet Tablets just to gather some experience, but they still are 100% committed to Symbian. In my opinion Motorola should have committed to Symbian as strongly as Nokia and Sony-Ericsson did, maybe allied with Sony-Ericsson in using UIQ.
The second problem with Motorola relates to first problem. As I said Motorola jumped everywhere in their search of finding a hit, as can be seen in operating systems front. The front where Motorola really failed was in introducing new phones. They had a hit with RAZR, which created an illusion that they were onto something. In reality they just had luck, and what they should have done, would have been to introduce tens of different variations of the phone. Now compare to Nokia witch doesn't really have hit products, but instead it has a large collection of small hits and fairly trading phones. When I just looked at Nokia's European web site I counted that they have 92 phones/devices available. Motorola really should have copied Nokia's formula on doing few platforms and customizing them rapidly and introducing countless of different phones with short life cycles.
Now, it might seem to some sad that Motorola is spinning their cellphone division out, but then again that might be the best option to take. When the cellphone division are their own company, they will concentrate into a one thing and a one thing only and either succeed of fail. I think a good example of this would be Sony-Ericsson where both Ericsson and Sony spinned their mobile phone divisions, and after the spin out the company has succeeded fairly well.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Ahh, finally someone mentions the REAL Motorola.
Both my mom and dad once worked for Motorola, no not making cell phone stuff, or embedded CPU's, they made televisions on an assembly line. That's right, televisions. My mother in particular made degausser coils. Then all of a sudden they were told that the factory had been sold, to some company called Matsushita that no one had heard of, but has dome minimal brand awareness as Panasonic. Matsushita then had Motorolas Quasar brand to use for themselves, because at that time there was still some pride in buying American. Well soon after Matsushita shut down the plant, they didn't really need it, they just wanted the name and some of the technology.
Motorola KNEW that, but didn't tell anyone. They did say before the sale that if any employee wanted to stay with Moto, they could move to Shaumburg on their own dime, and they might be able to offer them a job, no guarantees. Bastards just threw the workers to the dogs, I still loathe Motorola for what they did.
Another example regarding abstration. I'm an industrial engineer" myself. My profession would never exist if business systems could not be abstracted. There are operations research problems in auto manufacturing as well as retail. I used to do a lot of Monte Carlo simulation which I can and have used to solve problems in both manufacturing and finance. All the programming I've done I can use in any number of fields. A lot of skills are transferable between industries. Why should management be any different?
I was working in Arizona several years back, and attended several corporate presentations by Motorola. Once I flew up to Schaumburg for a day-long event where Motorola was trumpeting their "rebirth" just after the Freescale spinoff. The other attendees and I had some interesting conversations about the future of Motorola. We were all pretty pessimistic about the company's outlook.
Personally, I think that the Six Sigma movement was what started Motorola down the road to ruin. The entire management structure became fixated on playing the Six Sigma game, and lost sight of actually watching the competition or designing new products. Six Sigma became the perfect management circle-jerk. As the digital revolution in cell phones began, and cell phone networks spread throughout the third world, Motorola management was too busy computing error statistics for Six Sigma presentations to realize that their product line and the planned Iridium satellite system were already obsolete.
One event in particular sticks in my mind from the Schaumburg visit. During one presentation, a Motorola manager showed an org chart of the "old" Motorola, and then an org chart of the "new" Motorola, and assured everyone that Motorola was going to be back at the forefront of communications technology in short order thanks to the new corporate reorganization. The problem was that if you took the old org chart and rotated it 90 degrees, it looked exactly like the new one. Everyone I was with had a good laugh about that on the way back to the airport.