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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Iridium is a reminder of the sheer might of Motorola at their peak and also the sheer folly of their management.

The constellation was literal decades ahead of its time, they were mass-producing satellites before the concept of a mega-constellation was even on anyone's radar. Pretty much everything about it was technically amazing.

Unfortunately it was probably a contributing factor in putting Motorola under.

There is probably a timeline where Motorola doesn't collapse and space tech is accelerated by multiple decades as a result.

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Does anyone know of a good collection of literature that attempts to study how management and leadership of hugely successful organizations ends up getting corrupted to the point where the organization collapses?

This seems to be the fate of just about every corporation that's ever existed. They either collapse, or get absorbed by the state.

Then again, the state seems to be just another kind of organization that is subject to the same fate.

I’d recommend reading Eccentric Orbits, but it’s just the iridium story

This was way more impressive to me than the invention of the internet IMHO.

> Unfortunately it was probably a contributing factor in putting Motorola under.

What do you mean by this? Motorola is alive and doing reasonably well.

Dude Motorola doesn't even exist anymore. At its height Motorola had 150,000 employees. After it imploded in 2011, Lenovo bought the mobile brand name and what was left is now Motorola Solutions, a telecom company with 18,000 employees that's losing a billion dollars a year. I don't see how a company that's fifty thousand dollars a year per employee in the red can be doing well.

>what was left is now Motorola Solutions, a telecom company with 18,000 employees that's losing a billion dollars a year.

Fyi... I just looked up the 2020 10-K and 2021 2Q results for Motorola Solutions and it says they are profitable. $949 million in earnings in 2020.

It looks the other company spun off as Motorola Mobility cellphones was losing money in 2011.

https://sec.report/Document/0000068505-21-000008#:~:text=The....

https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/news/motorola-solutio...

As another commenter pointed out, you are misinformed regarding Motorola Solutions' profitability.

As far as 150,000->18,000 employees, that's primarily because Motorola spun off/sold off so many business units (ON Semi, GD Decision Systems, Freescale, Continental, Cambium, Zebra, and of course the split with Motorola Mobility). Most of these spinoffs exist today and are successful. As to whether spinning them off was a good idea or not, I can't really say, but the idea that Motorola has imploded or ceased to exist is just wrong.

That's Motorola Solutions.

The Motorola of old was broken up in 2011, into Motorola Mobility (for consumer products, including phones) + Motorola Solutions (professional products) + a cell network division which was sold to Nokia Siemens Networks.

Motorola Mobility is the one most likely known by the average person. It was bought by Google in 2012, then sold on to Lenovo in 2014. Its main legacy these days is the Moto line of phones.

The Motorola you are familiar with is a shadow of its former self.

It was an absolute titan in it's heyday, they basically created the modern electronics manufacturing ecosystem (especially in China). Developed a huge number of products across a whole number of industries. They were dominant in radio but were also damn good at all sorts of things, designed their own CPUs (some of the most loved CPUs of all time actually), the Apple Lisa and Macintosh both ran on Motorola CPUs, hell even the Next Cube used a Motorola chip.

A modern equivalent would be Apple, except only if Apple was about 10-20 years ahead of everyone else.

The collapse of Motorola was very much on the scale of present day Apple going bankrupt.

“There’s probably a timeline where” = “wouldn’t it be fun to imagine if things were different and turned out differently?”, but with a gossamer covering of adulthood, right?

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