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What Happened to Motorola
- pinewurst 2y ago(2014)
- Kon-Peki 2y agoI worked at Motorola in the early 2000s and can say that this is a largely correct accounting of the company. But, I offer a viewpoint on the reason for the downfall. It was the dotcom crash. You all remember that when the iPhone first came out, the cell phone networks in all the big employment centers fell over at lunchtime everyday, right? Because they couldn’t handle the data load. Well, that was supposed to be fixed over the course of the early 2000s. But the result of the crash caused telecoms all over the world to indefinitely postpone ~4g installations. When I was a college senior in 2000, I went to a Motorola recruiting event, a smartphone was put into my hand and I was told “this is the future of cellphones”. It would be put on sale soon and would change everything. Naturally I took the job working on the network side, getting the infrastructure ready for the age of the smartphone. Except it never happened. In the lab in Arlington Heights, I used a smartphone every single day to test the network code and hardware. But it was always delay, delay, delay from the telecoms on installing the infrastructure, until they finally admitted that they weren’t going to do it at all. So we pivoted; we worked on “2.5g” upgrades to existing equipment to squeeze out the maximum data rates out of what they already in the field, the cheap asses. The smartphone engineers were reassigned to other phone projects and it stagnated - they were still manufacturing tiny batches for internal needs but they stopped improving. And so when the iPhone came on the scene, telecoms rushed to spend money on upgrades - Motorola didn’t have infrastructure ready and it didn’t have smartphones ready. 3-4 years earlier and Motorola would have dominated and raked in the cash faster than they could count it.