Motorola split into two groups today in order to save their falling mobile business, but the real kicker is an insider’s email that Engadget published. It has it all, from suicides to golf scores and how all that brought a giant down. Good afternoon reading, albeit sad. Update: My personal rant/editorial on the situation, describing the failure of Motorola to understand the importance of their EZX Linux-based phones and how this drove their business down.
Motorola Implodes; Insider Tells All
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
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.
This has to be an urban legend. It can’t be true.
Edited 2008-03-26 22:15 UTC
It’s not an urban legend, and there are countless others like him. Hell, at least he doesn’t pretend that he knows about technology and knows the business of his company like a lot of CEOs and Chief Execs do. Hey Carly, how’s the beach?
The private jet thing is a classic. You don’t even have one these days, let alone a fleet. You hire them.
Alas, a company like that is beyond hope.
I said this years ago, right back with the G4/G5 fiasco with Apple; but of course, we were told by Motorola fanboys on this forum that I didn’t know what I was talking about. The point I was making back then, and I still make today, it is a symptom of a bigger issue. People look for the big bangs and crashes in a company when one should really look at the culmination of small but crucial stupid decisions and management to understand why a business goes south.
When a company can’t even get the basics right, how can they honestly get the big things right; when their priorities is on pampering management rather than management taking a leading role in the company – and being held accountable; is there any surprise that these things happen?
As for their mobile phones, they were bad 10 years ago, and they’re still bad now. Nothing has changed. Whilst Nokia, Erricson, Alcatel, Hyundai, Kyerocea and so forth have moved forward – there hasn’t been a single improvement over the quality in Motorola phones. They’re as shockingly unreliable now as they were 10 years ago.
I have only one thing to say about Motorola: their phones simply suck. They’re clinging to the same retarded menus and interfaces they’ve had for many many years. They were clumsy and awkward and hard to use 10 years ago and they’re the same now. So I’m not surprised. It has to be something seriously wrong with these people to persist in such bad technical decisions.
I was reading that and thinking damn…this could apply to a few companies I’ve worked for. It just rings so true.
Is that the reason why Google was able to be formed. A company supposedly run by engineers and look at the results.
I don’t know. I’m almost to the point where I think the future is engineering consultancy firms; owned and run by employees. Startups can be done inside the company with appropriate profit with the ‘founders’…Kind of like Googles 20% rule, though I’m sure it will be motorolized eventually
But yeah, I can’t count the number of bad ‘business’ decisions I’ve seen. I call them bad business decisions because the goal of business is to make money. Why do they make decisions that we know is going to be bad for the company; but they do it anyways and end up losing money. like duh….
What is the point of running technological company what can’t create anything useful?
There is a somewhat major investor who was suing over this :
http://www.forbes.com/markets/emergingmarkets/2008/03/24/icahn-moto…
“Carl Icahn wants to see some new faces on Motorola’s board and also wants the company’s hand-held division to be spun-off. He’s not just nicely asking Motorola to cooperate, he’s suing the company for documents he thinks might help his case and going on television to get more investors and spectators behind him.”
The problem this days is Management can be clueless but corporate raider are in it for short time buck and split company , it’s a recipe for disaster. You need Millions if not Billion to offset those legal problems.
With all the current problems , it must have been considered the lesser of two evil.
This is just further proof that CEOs are like shitty pro sports coaches. They just get recycled over and over and over ending up with the same failures. But I can’t blame them. The blame should fall squarely on the idiots who put them in charge.
Stakeholders who only have a financial interest in a company(board members and investors) are f–king idiots who shouldn’t be authorized to decide where to eat, let alone who to hire to run a company.
“They just get recycled over and over and over ending up with the same failures. But I can’t blame them. The blame should fall squarely on the idiots who put them in charge.”
I could not agree more. The worst part is when they fail, they STILL get paid millions to leave. Hell, if it was me I would be lucky to get 2 weeks pay. They can’t be blamed for doing it, because they get rewarded for doing it. What a system eh?
I blame it on e*trade and their subsequent followers. I wrestle with the concept, because I like the idea of empowerment for investors to manage trades themselves, but it has created a paradigm shift in the relationship between shareholder and vested corporation. There was a time when investing money was a commitment, it was inconvenient, you relied on professionals to handle it for you and they attached a considerable fee for their management, which discouraged whimsical speculation. There was a time, oh so long ago, that people invested money in a corporation expecting long term return. Now it’s a hobby to share info on forums and short stocks at a whim, and otherwise play havoc with share valuation.
Like I said, I wrestle with it because, on the one hand, it’s a powerful form of self-empowerment and represents many of the benefits that I think the internet enables, but at the same time, we have companies being held hostage now in many cases by shareholders demanding immediate and continual short-term growth, so CEO’s and boards of directors inevitably buckle and often strive for immediate gratification, at the expense of long-term planning and strategy.
High-level executives often switch positions so often now that nobody has a vested stake in seeing their ideas through, they often just create enough havoc to make their mark, move on, and leave it to someone else to clean up the mess…
I don’t think etrade has as much to do with it.
The small time investor doesn’t affect company policy or even demand growth…they’re nothing…just playing the stock.
Most companies are still owned by large institutional investors (moto was almost 80% ins owned at last check).
The second part of what you say is true. Few people ‘invest’ for long term company growth. Even for startups this is true. The executives are just there to build something until they can IPO or sell it asap and ‘dump’ the future of the company on someone else.
The folks on eTrade are not the problem. They are puny in comparison to many hedge funds. If anything point the finger at the hedge funds. But why point? This is called the stock market.
When you see forums driving stocks down you see that because that is what you want to see. For whatever direction the stock is going there are an appropriate number of fan folks saying this stock is worth X in a week.
A CEO can take two views with the market. Do whatever it wants and get punished, or grow the business. Those that grow the business do get rewarded.
I’m always biased towards working at NeXT and Apple, but as an M.E./CS I would relish the shot at working for Motorola and turn around a once Pioneering US Company and move it forward once again.
This company is an American Icon. Apple is an American Icon. Both show that with the wrong passion and misdirection you can drive anything into the ground.
I’m holding onto the stock. There is just too much IP in that company to not make it worthy of a future.
Hope that pays off for you
But Motorola is like the American Nortel. Sorry man. A great icon, but dying and everything it does just keeps getting worse. Once a company gets hit with bad management, its damn near impossible to recover. Key people leave, few good people want to join… It don’t look good.
In all it’s areas of, it’s competition is cleaning its clock. Wait for the small upside that will come at Moto, and then sell. Just my two cents.
I’m more looking at that stockpile of technology going to waste. It’s one of those companies that will go through a gutting before it gets revived.
It’ll come back, but it will take 5 years.
For Motorola to come back it has to have a moat. Something that it can exploit and earn money on. Motorola has nothing in that region. Chips are not worth the money to make. They are splitting off their phone business. For the TV and other business they have oodles of competition.
No Motorola is a dying company.
I would not compare Motorola with Apple. The main difference with Apple is that they had (have) a very loyal following that stuck with them through everything. Motorola does not have that.
I think Apple’s marketing and hype teams are far better than Motorolla’s too.
The company is a goner. I looked at their filings and the mobile business is half their income. The other stuff while growing does not have a wide moat protection.
over at engadget regarding the power of Software in that form factor.
I’m very sorry for all these big companies that spun off their semiconductor business : Freescale and ON Semi from Motorola, NXP from Philips, Infineon from Siemens…
For me it has always seemed short minded decision.
Freescale do produce (despite the Apple PPC stories) fine components and has a near monopoly in some embedded markets. They could have delivered innovative components for Motorola phones, instead of yet another ARM variants.
Motorola wherefore art thou ?
I keep hearing this name Motorola being called out yet it seems as if I only hear the ghost of what once was.
How long ago did Motorola die ? How many times can Motorola die and keep comming back to haunt us ?
Motorola absolutely ruled radio communication devices in 60’s and 70’s. There equipment was simply the best that money could by. I remember stories about there only being one thing left that still functioned in Taxi cabs drug out of the Hudson river in NYC-the Motorola radio.
Beginning in the early 70’s Motorola became *the* premiere semiconductor manufacturer in the US. Their products boasted the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer around. When Motorola started producing microprocessors they consistently produced the best, far better than the competing products from Intel.
Not only were Motorola processors the direct basis of the majority of all first and second generation microcomputers, they were also indirectly the basis of Apple and Commodore. Remember the 6502 ? The 6500, the immediate predecessor of the 6502 later used in Apple and then further modified into 6510, was pin for pin compatible with the Motorola 6800. Why ? Because half of the engineering team at Mostek where former Motorola Engineers and because the 6500 *was* a 6800.
Intel processors were, at the time, no match for the competition. Motorola(6800/6803/6809/6809E), Mostek(6502,6510), and Zilog(Z-80, Z-80a) accounted for probably 90% of the CPU’S in use in microcomputers in the late 70’s and early 80’s. (the Zilog Z-80 was a clone of Intels 8080 with a built in clock and serial port-much like the Mostek 650X line were clones of Motorola’s 680X line)
The first prototyped IBM PC used a Motorola 68000 processor. The choice to change to the Intel 8088 was made because the 68000 needed 16-bit wide memory which was still quite expensive -in contrast to the 8-bit+parity required for the 8088. Technologically the 68000 was only overtaken with the 80286,but by the time 80286 made it onto the market in numbers Motorola was already making the 68020. Although Intel created the first microprocessor with the 4004 Intel was playing catchup with Motorola in the late 70’s up until the late 80’s-not the other way around.
When I heard that Motorola was getting into the cellphone business I thought they could draw on their long engineering expertise to create the best cell phones around. I was wrong. Something had happened inside of Motorola- their cellphone technology was not even in the same league as their previous radio technologies in terms of quality, engineering, and technical superiority.
When Motorola split itself and divested itself of most of it’s semiconductor business, which ended up being known as FreeScale, I heard the first death-knoll, albeit this really was not first death-knoll. It is truly sad to have witnessed the downfall of one of the greatest engineering firms in history. This downfall has been on-going for 20 years now. That it has taken 20 years to fall this low only shows how great Motorola once was.
R.I.P Motorola
Long live Motorola. When I first started programming, the first assembly languages I learned were for Motorola processors — 6811 and 68k, and since then I’ve learned it for many other processors, including PowerPC. 68k will always hold a special place for me, with a very nice and clean instruction set, and clean chip engineering, it’s the nicest CISC ISA ever designed, and PowerPC (AIM alliance) is the nicest RISC ISA that I’ve ever worked with.
I also remember ordering engineering samples of motorola’s processors, from the cheapest through more expensive, and they wouldn’t give a second thought, just sent me chips. That and free documentation was a godsend to me, being a hobbyist engineer back in high school. It’s hard to find that these days anywhere you go. Sure, online, but it’s hard to get the dead tree edition, which is a necessity when doing this kind of work.
So I repeat: Long Live Motorola — in my mind at least.
All the coolest computers were powered by Moto chips. Amiga, Ataris, X680x0s, NeXTs … First programming I did was dragonball ASM which is mostly m68k ASM. I loved it.
I remember seeing motorola phones all over when I was a teenager (god, is that already more than a decade ago, i’m getting old faster than i want)
I don’t think I’ve seen a Moto phone in belgium for the last 5 years, except for some razr’s in the few months they were hot.
I remember my uncle getting a razr and giving it away because he hated it compared to blackberrys and nokias but that’s about it
ugh, razrs are horrid phones. Still super popular in my region for some reason (I’m in the south in the USA). I hate the buggers.
Yup, In the US and in the US media razrs seem to be so prevalent, probably cos the mobile market in the US sucks so bad, hence why everybody was so excited by the iphone (its good,no doubt, but not that great).
here in europe, a couple of years ago everbody seemed to have razrs, but these days I don’t see that many out and about.
Does this mean that they will be getting out of the DVR business?
God I hope so.
For its time, the MC68000 was the best CPU. Twin 68000 CPU arcade boards like Outrun and Powerdrift could do fantastic graphics that no PC or home computer could do at the time…
There were several arcade machines that used 3 motorolas and I swear I saw one that had 4 or 5.. But I can’t seem to find it…
I remember the 68020 and 68030 boxes made nice Unix servers, too. I had a customer with an NCR running, IIRC, AT&T Unix 3.x. It looked and felt pretty much the same as the 3B2’s I administered. Back then, the Unix desktop meant an AT&T 4410 terminal. Lucky users got the sleek new 605’s.