Goodbye Moto
chicagobusiness.com
chicagobusiness.com
Currently on the premises, there is a small Motorola Mobility office, whilst owned by Lenovo, still has a very Google feel when you look through their glass windows. There have been talks of various healthcare companies and even Magic Leap moving into the other vacant area we used to inhabit.
I still have hope in this company. I'm currently into the second internship and the gears are starting to move rapidly. I'm very happy to be working on some projects that I definitely see putting Motorola Solutions ahead of the game in public safety systems. And when I doubt if coming back from such a hit is possible, all I have to do is pull open my cubicle drawer and look at the pile of Motorola M6800's.
That's good I suppose. But I've heard from people in Schaumburg that there are more layoffs coming. I know a guy who took a severance package, rather than wait it out.
Just saying... at least get your resume ready, and work out now who you'll want to use for references.
The Chicago area used to be a tech hub, especially with regards to telecom. It is shocking how much has changed in the last 15 years.
● If a business isn't diversifying its risks and assets it can lose them all. Similar to family trees, too few kids and a single war or natural disaster can wipe out the whole family and permanently end their branch of their family tree.
● Don't be afraid to pivot. Nintendo was originally a playing card company. Samsung was originally a trading company. Squaresoft was originally a power line construction company.
● Be your own competition. If a new product in the company destroys the old products, that's a good thing. The company still wins. When you are your own competitor weather you win or lose, you still win.
Did you read the part about internal fiefdoms competing for a single pool of research money? Turning your own company and your own workers against each other is the classic way of burning all of your human resources (Microsoft Stack Ranking, Fall of Motorola, Fall of Nokia...)
In biotech, a standard practice is to spin off development start-ups, then re-acquire them.
You can't have your sectors compete by doing similar things.
At the same time, you have to float innovations up when they appear.
Competition has to mean empowerment, not bean-counting and tug-of-war
Microsoft could have invented the tablet, but of course the Windows division cut it off (there's an MS story about that which I can't find right now)
And the vision from above has to be clear and certain, otherwise you end with MS Surface, Zune, etc
Apple's product development is full of bumps and fights as well, but they listen to the innovators, not the naysayers or the people who think the iPad couldn't be shipped without an Office app
Microsoft _did_ invent the tablet. PC Tablet was around in Windows XP. It had gesture support and handwriting recognition since 2001.
Technology isn't about making new technologies unfortunately. Its about marketing new technologies and convincing tons of people to buy your stuff. It doesn't matter if you invented it first, aside from maybe the occasional Patents War...
> And the vision from above has to be clear and certain, otherwise you end with MS Surface, Zune, etc
Surface is one of the few things from Microsoft that is actually succeeding right now btw. But in case, innovation is literally about embracing the unknown before you know what to do with it.
There cannot be any "clear and certain" vision on innovative products. Otherwise, it wasn't really innovative to begin with.
I dunno, it just seems like your comment was especially "buzzwordy". In my experience, true innovation is hard as all heck to back, because nobody "gets" it. Marketing is a major problem... not just marketing to the rest of the world but also selling an innovation to your direct superior within your own team.
Really?
http://thediplomat.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-to-retire-after...
The JVM was utter crap though, with no JIT, so everything was 1/10th of the speed of Sony Ericsson phones or Nokia of the same era... still, at least they weren't too nonstandard, like Samsung and Lg who would change JVM and bugs every phone.
Also what killed Nokia
This is asinine. Motorola has licensed deals with almost every American and Canadian police/government force. They basically own digital RF encryption. They have a foothold in this industry and it's not close, and they can't be pushed out. If I was an employee in their radio division I could really care less if they are involved in phones are not.
It's still a billion dollar company, what are we even saying 'bye' to?
Wasn't that Blackberry's line?
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ABBRY&ei=h3SiVanIKY...
Could have been Sun Microsytem's too.
I think they're saying bye to relevance and innovation. They're worth half as much as Tesla, for example.
Yes, and years later BlackBerry is still around, with a CEO that's almost finished reversing the damage the previous ones caused.
I get your point, but still. Also, you seem to be conflating stock price with company success, health, etc. You shouldn't. Post 90s, they're pretty divorced from one another.
> I think they're saying bye to relevance and innovation. They're worth half as much as Tesla, for example.
No, they're worth half as much as Tesla according to the stock market. There's a big difference.
BlackBerry under the previous CEOs was much like Sun: lots of cool ideas, lots of smart people, but no direction towards shipping products people wanted.
Now it's like Apple shortly after buying NeXT. Only with no advertising (their current biggest flaw).
Btw, I'm glad Blackberry has turned it around. I bought the stock around $10. I should see it pop anytime now? Or you've got some other made up way to value a company and I should ignore the stock market?
Sun was actually in talks to buy Apple in ~1996 :)
If you continually have to tell your reader to "Scroll or arrow down to keep reading", something is wrong with the way you are presenting a webpage.
No matter how fashionable the techniques you're using are.
I didn't really mind reading it, though.
Its very good to recap and learn from history, but lets not get too sentimental. Corporate failure isn't made of the same stuff as individual failure. Its not like one guy doing really well, then falling on hard times. The people that built the successful company were long gone. Then complacent people took over. Then frightened and unimaginative people followed. Then finally only those that could not find a place anywhere else were left.
Many people at Motorola are excellent I'm sure. But for whatever reason, they don't have better options. There are many excellent unemployed people too. Employers don't have perfect information about these excellent workers ... that's the problem.
However, for whatever the reason ... the people at Motorola (not all of them, just most of them) are stuck there because they don't have an offer from a better company.
edit: solved by making browser window very wide
Moto didn't make the 6502, but they made the 68000 line (original Mac series) and then created PowerPC in a joint venture with IBM.
Semiconductors were spun off in 2004 to become Freescale, which is now owned by NXP (Philips).
- They never got software development right, they couldn't grow sw development beyond some basic ones for hardware
- They never got User Experience right. They never thought it was an issue, or they developed for engineers, not everyday people
- They don't think ahead of the curve, they don't treat their customers right (what about the Android upgrades from Motorola that were promised and not delivered)
Of course Android was developed outside of them, but they try to stick a "custom experience" there which is crap. They can't even do that one thing right.
You are aware about NSN, right? The one that was bought by Nokia
A lot of divisions sold and/or shutdown
I'm not googling it for you though.
Philips is going through some struggle, but they are still an important player on the lightning and healthcare technology markets. Just compare Philips' 105,300 employees to Motorola Solutions' 15,000 employees.
[1] BenQ Mobile ("BenQ-Siemens") went bust; Gigaset still manufactures DECT phones in Bocholt, Germany, as Europe's market leader; Unify (formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications) is still a major player; Nokia Networks (formerly Nokia Siemens Networks; formerly Nokia Networks + Siemens Networks) is now the backbone of Nokia.
> Siemens (energy, industry, mobility, healthcare technology) is alive and well
> Philips (...) still an important player on the lightning and healthcare technology markets
What it's common about those items is that they rely less on software (still, there are things like SCADA, etc) and have higher margins (B2B)
Not implying that you don't have a point; but as a matter of fact, Siemens was a pioneer in usability research of mobile phones. [1]
I distinctly recall Siemens phones of the early 2000s having crap UX, especially next to the Nokia 3310.
I later when out and bought a Moto X with a broken screen on craigslist and bought a replacement screen on ebay. That is what I am currently using and I happy with it.
Call the operator;say your message;& wait for the person to call you.
They talked about buying us potentially and we were crazy excited...
Interesting story though :)
I feel lucky to have bought this motorola moto g smart phone. It was way more value for the money it offered at. Everything works, much better than my old Galaxy Nexus.
It's kind unfair and harsh that the industry's early innovators could fall so quickly, as such is the case for Nokia.
I think that in this constantly cannabalizing industry, the lowest cost producer selling at cheapest prices will always end up driving incumbents out. Samsung is feeling the heat from Chinese companies because it failed to rebrand itself as an exclusive luxury product like Apple. Unfortunately the Android brand doesn't carry that brand premium, despite the fact that Galaxy phones are excellent in quality. But for Samsung, they are so big that even if they lost this smartphone market, they could continue to feed Korea from their numerous other industries. For Nokia and Motorola, they did not have the same luxury.
Yes, he said. He had headed the team who wrote the software for the RAZR/PEBL line.
He cut me off after I started apologising, saying that he agreed with everything I had said. Motorola had subcontracted out development to the company he'd worked for, and had provided a detail specification as to exactly what they wanted. What they wanted was simply bad: every UI design misfeature was deliberately designed in. The team would raise bugs along the lines of 'navigating menus takes ages. There needs to be a way to jump directly to a menu item --- you know, like Nokia has' or 'even after weeks of using the product our testing team still get lost inside the settings menu', and they'd always be closed as Works As Intended. Nobody cared.
But the hardware was beautiful. Robust, excellent battery life, felt good in the hand, well made, lots of nice attention to detail --- the PEBL's magnetic latch was a masterpiece. If only they'd put the same care into the software stack.
we need the PC revolution on mobile. badly.
to run natively, i think only the cameras and radios fimrwares are the problem.
I also think that the apps bundled by Motorola to android where all excellent. The first time I actually didn't want to uninstall these kind of thing.
I hope Motorola continue to produce things with this quality level.
The 2014 Moto X was basically the Nexus 5 successor that could've been. It's visually just a more reasonably sized and reasonably priced version of the Nexus 6 and was my first foray away from the Nexus line in several years.
My Moto 360 has also been mostly good as well. It flaked out at one point and I swapped it under warranty but the experience with customer service was a troubling sign of the state of the company. Their website had a lot of issues and I couldn't follow the normal process for requesting a warranty exchange until I managed to get hold of someone who knew what they were doing on the phone.
I really hope they don't start to go downhill now that they've left the Google umbrella because it seemed that they were really turning it around after years of poorly designed and annoyingly branded "DROID" phones.
Anyway, you can nowadays get an Asus ZenFone 5 with 2GB RAM and 16 GB storage for nearly the same price as a Moto G in Europe.
Of course, no near-vanilla Android ;).
The only problem I've found on it is its lack of a gyroscope, and subsequent lack of ability to use the Cardboard.
Also non GSM based phones/networks are a losing battle. At least AT&T and T-Mobile give you HSDPA when LTE isn't available.
The hardware is good (although it never really had a premium feel, even in the last version) but the software has always been Samsung's weak point. Samsung has been obsessed with crazy differentiation and putting in as many features as they could. They never tried to build a cohesive UX with their phones or even just to mitigate the performance impact of their customization.
So it is hard for me to really feel bad about Samsung.
Also, it says it was published July 13th 2015 - that's 2 days from now :-)
However this fixes the second problem ;-)
Array.prototype.slice.call(document.getElementsByClassName("footerText")).forEach(function(e) { e.innerHTML = 'Published on July 11, 2015.'; })
1. In Chrome, the "Audio Narration Off" was offscreen. I had to resize the browser to hit that button. Then it wouldn't show any content.
2. It worked just fine on my iPad. So maybe try a mobile device instead.
I noted earlier that it worked fine on Ubuntu using an old version of Chrome. That machine's monitor is 1360x768.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuengling
A possible key to the family's longevity is that each successive generation buys the business from the previous generation and it is not gifted to them.