[pfdietz]

Motorola couldn't do software very well. And software became increasingly important in all the fields they competed in.

It turned out to be easier to take a company that was great at software, and turn it into a cellphone company, rather than trying to take a cellphone company and make it great at software.

[cestith]

Motorola wasn't just some cellphone company. The car radio went into production there after Galvin hired Wavering and Lear. He later changed the name of the company to name it after that product. The automotive alternator was invented there (by Wavering). They made the 6800, 6809, 68k, and POWER/PowerPC processor lines used in various lines of Apple, Tandy, Sun, Amiga (later Commodore Amiga), SGI, HP, IBM, Momentum, and Raptor Engineering computers (the POWER/PowerPC was a partnership with IBM and Apple but largely designed at Motorola). Neil Armstrong spoke into a Motorola transceiver from the moon.

Motorola broke up into way more than two companies over time. It sold its TV business to Matsushita in 1974. Motorola bought General Instruments and became the largest builder of set-top devices in the world and also spun off ON Semiconductor in 1999. Later this home products division would largely end up sold to Arris. Freescale Semiconductor split off in 2003 then later merged into NXP in 2015. Further spinoffs and department selloffs include Iridium, what became General Dynamics Decision Systems, and Cambium Networks.

[eigenvalue]

Yes, and even the legacy business (which makes radios for emergency responders among many other things) has been a great investment. If you bought MSI 10 years ago, you've made just under a 20% annualized return if you reinvested dividends. And ON Semi has been almost as good over the past decade. It's only in consumer cellphones where they did really badly.

[bdcravens]

Is it common to refer to it as MSI (the stock ticker for Motorola Solutions)? I would think most think of the computer hardware company when they hear that.

[eigenvalue]

That’s the stock symbol for the company. Investors often refer to companies by their tickers.

[walrus01]

Iridium wasn't a sell-off. Motorola was one of the largest investors in Iridium, and lost a vast amount of money when it went bankrupt. Additionally they were deeply involved in its hardware.

The second incarnation of the Iridium corporation we know now is the group of people who bought it at pennies on the dollar in the bankruptcy auction.

[OldHand2018]

Iridium went under because the developing world installed mobile networks, and Motorola had a huge portion of that market.

Accounting tricks aside, they didn't lose money on the downfall.

[ppg677]

Iridium was doomed from day 1. The system could only support a small number of subscribers. It was nearly impossible to recoup the capital expenditures given the capacity of the system.

[ansible]

Yes.

Before the start of the smartphone revolution (circa 2005) the "smartphones" of the time are what we'd call flip-phones now. They were smart in the sense that they could run apps (J2ME, blech), take pictures and such.

Moto had dozens of different models at any given point in time. All running various kinds of (what we'd call today) embedded operating systems, closer to what we'd class as a RTOS these days. Stuff like Symbian. Most / all of them were not that easy to do application development with. And none could really scale up in processing power (multi-core, which wasn't a thing back then), decent TCP/IP networking, and driving a large and complicated GUI.

In one sense, as a leader in the cell phone business, they should have been well placed to make a big splash with smartphones. But none of their software on that side of things was able to transition to that, which is why they adopted Android. To their credit, they did produce some decent Android phones, but because they relied on Google, they were now also competing severely with HTC, Samsung, LG and others.

[OldHand2018]

I worked in the mobile network part of Motorola. We had smartphones in the lab for testing in 2001. We were all told that they would be on sale by 2003. But that never happened.

All of my interactions with the cellphone division were somewhat negative. You got the impression that they thought of themselves as the best of the best and nothing you could offer was worth their attention. The damned RAZR success probably doomed them for good. I was using the smartphones every single day and was making suggestions for UI improvements and software features. They ignored all of it. Oh well. Everything I suggested became obvious updates once the general public had used the iPhone for a year or two.

[ansible]

What happened with the network / base station side of the business? Moto was doing very well with that in the 1990's. It seemed like that business kind of evaporated, but I don't know why.

[OldHand2018]

It lives on, as a Nokia/Siemens joint venture.

Edit: apparently Nokia bought out Siemens years ago

[ansible]

Oh, I hadn't realized it also got sold off.

Let's see, what all was sold off:

computer division, analog ICs (Onsemi), digitial ICs (Freescale, NXP), base stations (as mentioned), mobile phones (Motorola Mobility, Google, Lenovo). What did I miss?

It is funny that the Motorola as we knew it is gone, but many of the pieces remain. And others were able to make money using those pieces.

To this day I still fail to understand the corporate strategy behind all that.

[pfdietz]

Large companies are often worth less than the sum of their parts, particularly if there's little synergy between the parts.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.as...

[joezydeco]

There are pockets of ex-Moto software engineers that have splintered off from Libertyville and/or Mart that still continue to contaminate the tech scene in Chicago.

I worked with a group of them a few years ago. Their skills were shit but they all walked around expecting managerial positions.

[octetta]

That's a pretty bold comment for such a large site... did you have any good experiences with other folks from Moto?

[joezydeco]

The hardware engineers, especially the RF guys, were stellar.

I also worked with a group that spun out of Paging down in Florida and helped design XM Radio's transmission protocol. That was a neat design.

[octetta]

Just curious. I worked with two SWE's there, both top notch.

[mytailorisrich]

In the case of Apple, I think it's especially a case of a company great at products. They did great because they had a great vision of the product.