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They went 15 years post-bankruptcy floundering around post bankruptcy without being able to replace a single one of their rapidly decaying satellites. They made numerous plans over those 17 years and none could get funded because they never made financial sense.

They could never get funding to use Ukrainian Dnepr rockets even if they were cheaper than SpaceX. The Ukrainians rockets payload capacity is far smaller than a Falcon 9, quality is questionable, and clearly would never have been able to hit the cadence Iridium needed (only 9 launches this decade, barely more than one per year).

Then SpaceX came along. No-one thought the Falcon 9 would be a success, because it was so ambitious compared to the Falcon 1. Then no-one thought SpaceX could be competitive on pricing, and SpaceX blew everyone away on pricing way before they even started re-using their rockets (because Musk and his team were smart enough to design the Falcon 9 to be the first rocket that could be mass assembled. He's not Tesla or Edison, in reality he's Henry Ford). SpaceX's success proving the Falcon 9 was a big reason iridium got the massive funding they needed for the new satellites.