7 ms·

This is really a fantastic, in-depth article, and highlights a lot of pieces about Motorola's history of which I was totally unaware. The breadth of their innov

by cwal37 12y ago

This is really a fantastic, in-depth article, and highlights a lot of pieces about Motorola's history of which I was totally unaware. The breadth of their innovations was far greater than I realized, and the early decision to set up a world class shop in China seems to be very visible today in that area of the world. That the internal competitions eventually led to internal war between different "tribes" doesn't totally surprise me. It seems you always read about that eventually happening in the post-mortem of any company with that type of structure. I wonder if there's a good way to balance internal competition. I imagine you would have to keep close watch on the overall silo-ing of each department. I'm from the Chicago area, and I remember driving by their campus many times over the years as a kid, only really having an idea that they were somehow involved in phones. I was in high school when the Razr came out, and based on how popular it was I thought Motorola was an absolutely world-dominating company, not a business on the rebound from extremely heady heights.

derekp7 12y ago
I used to work in their cell phone sector, then moved to corporate IT. The joke at the time was: A meeting was called between Chris Galvin (the CEO at the time), and the heads of the various departments, to show their new technologies. The cell phone guy says "We have a new cell phone, that you can also send and receive pages on it". The guy from the 2-way radio sector says "We have a new radio, you can use it to make cell phone calls on too. And we are working on adding paging capabilities to it". Then the guy from the pager sector plops his device on the table, and says "Our new pager is 2-way, and we've add the ability to make calls on it, with a earpiece attachment. And it has a built-in FM radio". And all the devices took a different power adapter, and different battery.
salem 12y ago
I was in Motorola labs until 2003, and the article is spot on. I had heard crazy stories back then, for example how the handset division (PCS) had to reverse-engineer Motorola Semiconductor products after buying a phone on the street in Hong Kong because they could not get the specs internally. The whole idea of Motorola competing with itself sounded as crazy to us then as it does now. Motorola was way too silo'ed and metrics driven, with a ruthless focus on efficiency, that was often short sighted. I guess no one there read the Innovators Dilemma.
- pavlov 12y ago
  Drawing lessons from The Innovator's Dilemma is harder than it seems. In the early 2000s, Nokia's management team often referred to the book. CEO Jorma Ollila has said that he tried to build a corporation that would avoid the traps described in the book. Yet when we look back now, it seems obvious that Nokia was coasting on increasing profit margins and incremental innovation to drive its featurephone and Symbian smartphone lines. How did that happen? My impression is that Nokia misjudged their market position. They saw themselves as the upstart innovator as compared to traditional PC vendors. Just before the iPhone was unveiled, Nokia introduced the N95 smartphone with the tag line "This is what computers have become." In Nokia's eyes, their phones were going to disrupt computers in a few years. But they were beaten by Apple's better vision of what the disruptive mobile computer should look like, and they never recovered from that punch.
  - salem 12y ago
    It was pretty obvious in 2003 that PCS was too focused on the US market, and ignoring "niche" GSM touch-screen smartphones at their peril. In 2003 PCS China developed a Linux-powered touch-screen phone that ran Java (J2ME) apps, the A760. A clear predecessor to Android. It never launched outside of Asia because it wasn't developed in the USA, and wasn't the razr.
  - rational-future 12y ago
    I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)
    - joezydeco 12y ago
      If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.
      - 12y ago
guelo 12y ago
Stupid "free market" ideologues. Edward Lampert is another one, doing the same thing and killing Sears.
- eldavido 12y ago
  Not so fast. It seems clarity of focus and mission counts for a lot. When I look at a company like Sears, I don't get the sense of focus I get from a company like Apple. It's surprising how little clarity the rank-and-file of many businesses have around what they're actually doing. In the case of Sears, are they trying to compete with Amazon? Or be a great local retailer? Or make great tools (Craftsman) and sell them directly and/or through channels? Metrics are important but they aren't a substitute for vision and focus. When I see businesses driven from the very top levels of executive management strictly by metrics and numbers, I often wonder whether it's a symptom of a lack of focus and clarity from the folks at the top. Metrics are a great management tool, but they aren't good for setting direction, or leading.
sliverstorm 12y ago
My first guess is that, in a perfect world, you would reduce the internal competition accordingly as the external competition grows. When you are the only one making phones, internal struggle is good; when you are one of many, internal struggle makes you vulnerable.

by cwal37 12y ago

derekp7 12y ago

I used to work in their cell phone sector, then moved to corporate IT. The joke at the time was: A meeting was called between Chris Galvin (the CEO at the time), and the heads of the various departments, to show their new technologies. The cell phone guy says "We have a new cell phone, that you can also send and receive pages on it". The guy from the 2-way radio sector says "We have a new radio, you can use it to make cell phone calls on too. And we are working on adding paging capabilities to it". Then the guy from the pager sector plops his device on the table, and says "Our new pager is 2-way, and we've add the ability to make calls on it, with a earpiece attachment. And it has a built-in FM radio". And all the devices took a different power adapter, and different battery.

salem 12y ago

I was in Motorola labs until 2003, and the article is spot on. I had heard crazy stories back then, for example how the handset division (PCS) had to reverse-engineer Motorola Semiconductor products after buying a phone on the street in Hong Kong because they could not get the specs internally. The whole idea of Motorola competing with itself sounded as crazy to us then as it does now. Motorola was way too silo'ed and metrics driven, with a ruthless focus on efficiency, that was often short sighted. I guess no one there read the Innovators Dilemma.

pavlov 12y ago
Drawing lessons from The Innovator's Dilemma is harder than it seems. In the early 2000s, Nokia's management team often referred to the book. CEO Jorma Ollila has said that he tried to build a corporation that would avoid the traps described in the book. Yet when we look back now, it seems obvious that Nokia was coasting on increasing profit margins and incremental innovation to drive its featurephone and Symbian smartphone lines. How did that happen? My impression is that Nokia misjudged their market position. They saw themselves as the upstart innovator as compared to traditional PC vendors. Just before the iPhone was unveiled, Nokia introduced the N95 smartphone with the tag line "This is what computers have become." In Nokia's eyes, their phones were going to disrupt computers in a few years. But they were beaten by Apple's better vision of what the disruptive mobile computer should look like, and they never recovered from that punch.
- salem 12y ago
  It was pretty obvious in 2003 that PCS was too focused on the US market, and ignoring "niche" GSM touch-screen smartphones at their peril. In 2003 PCS China developed a Linux-powered touch-screen phone that ran Java (J2ME) apps, the A760. A clear predecessor to Android. It never launched outside of Asia because it wasn't developed in the USA, and wasn't the razr.
- rational-future 12y ago
  I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.
    - 12y ago

guelo 12y ago

Stupid "free market" ideologues. Edward Lampert is another one, doing the same thing and killing Sears.

eldavido 12y ago
Not so fast. It seems clarity of focus and mission counts for a lot. When I look at a company like Sears, I don't get the sense of focus I get from a company like Apple. It's surprising how little clarity the rank-and-file of many businesses have around what they're actually doing. In the case of Sears, are they trying to compete with Amazon? Or be a great local retailer? Or make great tools (Craftsman) and sell them directly and/or through channels? Metrics are important but they aren't a substitute for vision and focus. When I see businesses driven from the very top levels of executive management strictly by metrics and numbers, I often wonder whether it's a symptom of a lack of focus and clarity from the folks at the top. Metrics are a great management tool, but they aren't good for setting direction, or leading.

sliverstorm 12y ago

My first guess is that, in a perfect world, you would reduce the internal competition accordingly as the external competition grows. When you are the only one making phones, internal struggle is good; when you are one of many, internal struggle makes you vulnerable.