It is being demolished now. The company doing the demolition must be very proud of destroying things, because they make drone & time-lapsed videos of it:
Why shouldn't they take pride in their work? Its honest and important work. Not every building can/should be preserved, tearing down these structures is important to remove dilapidated safety hazards and/or build something new
A few years ago they were demolishing a building across from my office. They had various demolition equipment, mainly big backhoes including some equipped with grabbing. They were taking their time ripping stuff apart, and then sorting through what they'd broken off to separate out all the rebar and other metal.
What I liked was, at the end of each day, the crew lined up all the equipment and put each in what I would call a "majestic" pose, like with its arm looking purposeful. I thought it gave a cool, and professional look to the construction site, and showed they obviously cared about what they were doing, to clean up and pose the equipment, vs just leaving it where it was when the shift ended.
Random tangent: This is the most bizarre thing I've seen in a while. At the bottom of the page is a "Protected by Recaptcha" logo that follows the page around. Clicking on it does nothing and no Recaptcha is displayed. What is it supposedly protecting and how is it doing that protecting if no Captcha is displayed? (I browse privately and am constantly hit with Captchas, but this one didn't prompt me.)
Recaptcha version 3 doesn't need to show you a CAPTCHA. It just calculates a score in the background, and of course it's up to the website to determine what to do with this score.
The Zurich building on the campus is pleasant on the eyes even thought they are a not so good employer, and they have a Top Golf now (some /s intended).
The Zurich building looks like mega sized shipping containers. (I know - that is the intended design look). My aunt worked for Zuirich for almost 20 years (in the towers), never heard anything extraordinarily bad other than normal employee grumblings.
Even stranger is the abandoned Motorola complex built way out among the farmlands in Harvard, Illinois.
Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!
So that Harvard facility -- from what I heard (when I worked for Moto) was that it was built for the main purpose to give to one of the Galvin family members to manage. They built it as an engineering and manufacturing center, and was expecting a bunch of engineers that worked at Libertyville to move out there. Problem is that was during the dot-com boom and people would rather get a different job then relocate to the middle of a corn field (actually a lot of people bought out in Crystal Lake, causing a housing boom there, which later collapsed when the Harvard building was shut down).
Then they outsourced manufacturing (the phones were no longer bullet proof after the outsourcing / offshoring). So they made Harvard a distribution center. They were hoping to also be able to pull workers from Rockford, but that didn't really work out either.
At one point, after Moto sold the building, an investor was going to turn it into the worlds largest indoor water park. That never panned out either.
I assumed from the title that this would be the Harvard facility. I never would have dreamed that Schaumburg would be shut down as long as the brand existed. How wrong I was!
I grew up in a neighboring suburb to Schaumburg, and in junior high or high school in the late 80's early 90's I remember taking a field trip to the Motorola campus (as well as McDonald's Hamburger University!). Mostly I remember a showroom museum of sorts, where much of the early tech, military field radios I remember mostly, was on display.
At the time I was underwhelmed, I think in part because I knew Motorola as a failing microprocessor company, but I was sad I didn't see what appeared to be that museum space in any of the pictures in the linked gallery.
For those that are wondering, here is the campus on maps: https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9. It looks like it's mostly been torn down now (streetview and satellite show it gone).
I never visited the campus. My next door neighbor worked there (he was a big RF guy and had a a giant shortwave antenna on his roof). They also employed so many people that they had their own stoplights at their entrance/exit. Plus the city convinced them to do staggered start/end times for their employees as to not flood the roads around the building.
That would be the Motorola Museum at the Galvin Center (which was their employee training facility). Whenever I went there for my 6-sigma or 5-nines training, I'd take a stroll through the museum and thought it was cool, but sad that it was mostly accessible only to Motorola employees and invited guests (since you needed an access badge to get on campus). I always wondered why they didn't have the museum face a public parking lot with public access.
Fascinating. Motorola has been part of some very significant things in history (not just because I'm multi-Amiga owner).
From my outsider view, it seems the companies who really invest in R&D make the best things happen. Unfortunately the best doesn't always mean the most long term successful (depends on many many more factors than just the quality of the product).
I would love to see a world where it was fashionable for companies to proudly devote 20+% to R&D. It seems instead like R&D is 2% at best, and marketing (or legal... patents) is 18%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The flip side of that argument is look at how vertically integrated companies like Samsung are. Apple used to buy processors and such from other IC vendors, and now they are doing that in-house.
I don't know how Motorola could have been fixed though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a commercial company the aim of R&D is to ship competitive products. You can spend a lot of R&D and do plenty of cool stuff but if you don't ship products you'll go under all the same.
For instance Xerox was doing plenty of cool and innovative stuff with GUIs and the mouse but then it was someone like Jobs (and Bill Gates) that turned that into a hot product. Where's Xerox now? Where's Apple?
In engineering we too often forget that sales and marketing are crucial.
Xerox: I was there. I just published a book [1] about that, written as historical fiction but all facts are accurate. The idea is, you can put yourself into the story without knowing how it turns out. In particular, you can see how something like that can happen.
This last point is key in the modem connected world.
Before internet, you marketed by being in the right places with the right people. Now you have to have a global internet strategy and compete with companies who have nothing but marketing (and funding).
I’ve been thinking in 50 or 100 years from now, will this be the case for the Apple Starship campus? I’m sure Motorola seemed indomitable at the time of its construction.
Most likely global capitalism will thrive in the face of global warming. Creative destruction. All the infrastructure to be rebuilt, the huge projects, warlike government expenditures, replacing the worlds fleet of vehicles, expanding the grid multiple times.
It will be absolutely Faustian…
People were taking too much time between new cars
This is fair. I wonder if that will require a new generation of corporation, though. And the current generation of corporate HQs don't look nearly defensible enough. Something more like the Tyrell Corporation Ziggurat will be needed.
I had a friend who worked at Motorola back when they had acres of clean rooms... he said he always had to fight the urge to open one of the emergency exits, sneeze loudly into it, and then close the door. ;-)
I love the tone of this, it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization.
“there were old wall slogans inside that must have been added to motivate and inspire the employees” … “ the tall building had several brick structures on the lower main level. He suspected that those structures probably had plants and ferns in them so that important business clients and employees would be met with a pleasing sight upon entering.” … “Martin Gonzalez also noticed pictures of people using Motorola products that had been left on the walls of the building.”
Indeed, the ways of the people of the Motorola civilization of around 2011CE are mysterious and strange to us. Perhaps the central atrium served some kind of ritual purpose? Were prisoners perhaps thrown off the upper balconies as a sacrifice to their gods? We will never really know.
@pfdietz the battered remnants of the cult of "Six Sigma" looks strangely like post Soviet abandoned building triumphalist wall writings, albeit with western typography
“Ritual statistical magic” is even more genius: Future civilizations will look down on us for believing that statistics were part of science, not not seeing the hand of the cleric in making them up, just like we look down on middle ages for believing anything monks pretended to translate from the Bible, which in fact they made up.
Perhaps they will regard our current obsession with machine learning as a sort of Tower of Babel built out of made-up statistics. Or a castle in the sky.
Gives you another perspective on the hieroglyphs on walls in ancient Egypt though if you imagine them being put there by enthusiastic religious branding consultants, and inducing just as much eye rolling from the citizens of the day…
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?"
The most cringey one to me is the Philips one "Let's make things better". Funny enough their slide down into relative obscurity started right after introducing that slogan. Up to that point they were one of the powerhouses of technology.
Today they are still active in Medical, TVs and light, a faint shadow of what they used to be.
Light is definitely theirs as well, and even though the TVs and white goods are made abroad they are still just as much Philips's creations as Intel is making CPUs.
(Given that this is in my country and in my field of interest that's a pretty good indication of how big of a miss this is, so thank you for the correction.)
After 2004, they ditched that slogan and started using "Sense and Simplicity" as their new slogan.
I remember after that their consumer electronics got really, really bad. Basically all their products were just... not finished. The firmware on most of their devices was just terribly buggy, and features advertised on the box where sometimes not even available. I remember having an MP3 player where selecting the FM radio mode would just crash the device. Never did they release a firmware version that would enable FM radio mode. I had to carry a small metal pin in my wallet, just to be able to use the reset button behind a tiny hole in the side of the MP3 player. I usually had to reset it once or twice a day.
I also had a media streamer that did not work at all out of the box, it just didn't support any of the advertised codecs. And I had a Phlips TV that would reliably crash when switching from TV mode to Teletext mode.
Living in the Netherlands, I felt kind of obligated to choose Philips over brands such as Samsung. However, many times I found myself returning a Philips appliance, and buying a Korean/Japanese made alternative instead.
Never, ever again will I trust them for consumer electronics.
Same here, every Philips device bought after the mid 90's was junk. At some point they even couldn't make vacuum cleaners that worked or fridges that didn't fail completely within the warranty. Which is also why plenty of the bigbox outlets stopped offering their stuff, the quality was just incredibly bad.
And given how much goodwill that brand had it is very impressive how fast it was run into the ground. I still see their TVs for sale here, and medical devices and some stuff for infants.
Philips in the Netherlands and Thomson in France went the same way (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_(marque)) - after being major manufacturers of consumer products, they are now licensing their consumer brand to third party manufacturers.
Basically they are banking on their previous glories and advertising.
Sometimes you can spot the exact same product from a noname manufacturer, it's just missing the right sticker.
They're not remotely obscure in the medical field. By the numbers, Philips has been a medical devices company for a long time.
They have been slowly getting out of the consumer business for a long time. They just recently spun off their remaining consumer appliances business after having spun off lighting some years ago.
On my startup’s wall, I have the top cringy slogans of my customers. In the middle sits:
“We advance humanity.”
I guess the message is, don’t take yourself too seriously, most of where companies succeed is happenstance. It still takes a moment to all visitors to understand that it can’t be serious.
I love this sort of blend of urban exploration and archeology. I actually made a video game about it, inspired by the "sublime" of uninhabitable (yet comfortable) exurbs of midwestern USA: https://q-andrew.itch.io/anemoiapolis
If you haven’t read it already, you might enjoy Motel of the Mysteries[0] where an archeologist from the future stumbles upon the ruins of a present days motel and speculates over its use and the artifacts found within.
I used to live at International Village apartments near Moto headquarters. In those days MotoRazr craze starting to fade as IPhone was just launched. I remember layoffs were started and bunch of folks were laid off in teams I worked with.
This looks like a set piece from the game Control!
If they ever filmed a movie version of that game (which they probably shouldn't, as it could never do the game justice), they should do it at that location...
They also have a former HQ on the outskirts of, IIRC, Swindon in the UK, which was/seemed abandoned for years. I was used in one of the Brosnan James Bond movies when it was first built.
I suppose it depends on how you define "downfall", but Motorola stock this year is at an all-time high, even higher than its peak during late 90s during the run up to the dot-com boom and when Motorola cellphones were king.
There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
How about the Quincy office, near where Wavering worked and near where he and Lear were each born before making the product that would be the name of the company? Even the last little local sales office closed years ago.
I moved down to Texas from Quincy about a decade ago. I lived most of my life before that in Hannibal and Quincy. There's a lot of business missing up there. Gardner Denver I think moved their HQ several years ago but kept the plant. Moormans sold. Quincy Soybean still has some work there but sold and closed the HQ. Building Technolgoies closed in Hannibal in the 80s. They never rebuilt the grain elevator at Hannibal after the 1993 flood. Buckhorn Rubber closed about a year ago. They never rebuilt the trainyard at West Quincy after the '93 flood either. I'm not sure if Harris still builds broadcast equipment there or not. I think Knapheide and Hollister Whitney are still doing well.
The Libertyville office is now an "innovation center". I think the manufacturing floor is being used to make EV chargers by a company based in Amsterdam.
It's amazing that neither the article nor any of the comments so far mention that Google bought part of Motorola, for its 10,000 patents. Then sold it a few years later.
I was in Google Patents and I interviewed people for the position of "acquirer of patents." This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal.
My dad worked for a division of Motorola that was bought by Google and it sure felt like, during that time, if you were working for Motorola you could be laid off at a moment's notice.
Google stock was eventually included in his compensation package, though. I can imagine that eased some of the worry.
It's not relevant to the article, which is about real estate. Also, the article mentions the split into two companies. Google bought Motorola Mobility, but the headquarters went to Motorola Solutions.
> This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal.
Could anyone expand on this? Sounds interesting, and I know little about it.
Search for the "smartphone patent wars". There was a few year period when basically everyone involved in the industry were suing each other for pretty much anything. Even user interfaces.
The graphs of who was suing whom are hilarious by today's standards,.
That included a row over the generic concept of a tablet, where in defense the Samsung lawyers brought up prior art ... from the Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". The astronauts in the movie are using something that looks just like a tablet.
When Blue Origin sued SpaceX over a patent on the concept of landing a rocket stage on a ship, SpaceX showed a Soviet movie with a scene where (fictionally) just that happens.
You don't patent a "concept." You patent an invention.
I'm not familiar with that particular case, but I really doubt that a clip from 2001 was dispositive of anything. Unless the patent really was as broad as "a flat computing device."
This was a design patent, not a utility patent. That means they patented the look of the tablet, meaning the non-functional parts. They did not have a patent on the "concept of a tablet."
I guess I can go look up that design patent now. It's entirely possible that 2001 did anticipate the look of the iPad, but we can also look at the record of the trial to find out how this played out.
If you know how to find the outcome of this particular legal argument I'd be very happy to read it :). I was studying at the time and a lawyer that was teaching us the basics of copyright and patent law told us about the then ongoing case.
Also, yes, you're right, forgot some key details after the 10 years. Can't believe it was that long ago.
I think what he is referring to is when two mega corps would get into an IP dispute, the lawyers would bring the patent portfolios to the table. It would not be feasible to actually read through them all, so the agreement would be "surely in my large stack you are violating something and surely in your large stack we are violating something." So then you would weigh or measure the height of the stack, and the owner of the smaller would pay some royalties to the owner of the larger.
This is an exaggeration of course, but perhaps not far off the mark.
> "This is an exaggeration"
Ya think? Maybe when a big company is threatening a rube. If two big companies are making a deal, you can be damn sure that they use all available software to analyze each other's portfolios, and then read, manually, the ones that seem important. And get their legal counsels for the relevant divisions to read them, too, although they probably already know them.
Cross-licensing deals are immensely complicated. You have to think about indemnifying the partners, in particular. I actually sat in the Apple v. Samsung trial for one day, because Google was indemnifying Samsung, as they frequently do for Android partners.
A big problem with Motorola was: they actually make the hardware, so Google was being sued directly. The patent infringement suits are usually against the company that makes the device.
Not just their patents, but also their cellphone division. My understanding was that the Motorola phones were going to be Google's flagship devices for Android.
So I bought one, and I really liked it - I got regular OS updates (unlike many Android licensees), the phone had a gorgeous walnut veneer back, and it fit well in my hand. Nice.
I had a few and then switched last time to a Nokia 6.1 which is simply brilliant (the industrial design for a cheap end of mid-range is amazing - as is the build quality).
If anything Nokia cocked up, they made a phone so good I haven't seen the need to upgrade and since it's AndroidOne I'm still getting updates.
I had a Moto X (2014), and I had a very similar impression. The launcher was very minimal and AOSP-like. It was also one of the first Android devices that had always-on listening for a trigger word (Hello Moto X?). I always found that almost magically useful at setting alarms when I was already in bed.
I had a peak-motorola era moto G - it was fast, up to date, devoid of bloatware, and the camera was of incredible quality for such a cheap phone. the only downside was it was flimsy and met an early death at the hands of my merciless kitchen tile
I always thought those big patent acquisition deals were as a mutually assured destruction tool in a potential patent fight. If sued they would have something to countersue with somewhere in that massive pile of vague patents.
If you like this sort of thing. Bright Sun Films[1] on youtube does a lot of the same abandoned investigation content. Often digging a bit into the history of why something was abandoned in the first place.
According to company legend, the name was a combination of "Motor" and "Victrola"; the company founder Paul Galvin made some of the earliest car radios, and the Victrola brand name was well-known at the time for its phonographs.
I had assumed it was European. I put it next to Qualcomm.
Now that I fact check myself, Qualcomm isn't based in Scandinavia like I thought, but rather San Diego. I guess I just mix all hot-hardware companies of the '90s in with Ericsson!
Brought to mind the famous video by Dave Haynie about the last days of Commodore and their then almost empty fab in West Chester, PA, just days before the bankruptcy ended it all. If you want an account on how it feels when it's happening, that's probably the video to watch. Contains some interesting vintage technical stuff too.
As an old Amiga user, It makes me both sad and angry every time I watch it.
Super interesting. I grew up in a nearby suburb and when I was younger Motorola was THE company in the area. It felt like nearly all of my friend's parents were employees. It's amazing how quickly they fell off.
The main building was known as IL02, this is where I had my first job interview (the Blue Conference Room!) and afterwards joined Motorola Labs in 2004. The tall building shown was called the Sector Tower, a lot of money was spent renovating it. My colleagues and I would walk up the 6 floors and down after lunch for exercise. Mot Labs had 1000+ people around the world when I joined, was down to ~30 in 2010. How the times change.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadhttps://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaum...
Edit: I meant this in a positive tone, not a negative. I'm glad they take pride in their work.
I’m proud too when I refactor bad code.
What I liked was, at the end of each day, the crew lined up all the equipment and put each in what I would call a "majestic" pose, like with its arm looking purposeful. I thought it gave a cool, and professional look to the construction site, and showed they obviously cared about what they were doing, to clean up and pose the equipment, vs just leaving it where it was when the shift ended.
Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!
Then they outsourced manufacturing (the phones were no longer bullet proof after the outsourcing / offshoring). So they made Harvard a distribution center. They were hoping to also be able to pull workers from Rockford, but that didn't really work out either.
At one point, after Moto sold the building, an investor was going to turn it into the worlds largest indoor water park. That never panned out either.
At the time I was underwhelmed, I think in part because I knew Motorola as a failing microprocessor company, but I was sad I didn't see what appeared to be that museum space in any of the pictures in the linked gallery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1aEJFTUmkg
https://vimeo.com/308429582
I find it fascinating how all the metal bits are carefully separated and stacked (using big hydraulic claws) for recycling.
For those that are wondering, here is the campus on maps: https://goo.gl/maps/WdHju125jSbmRbaS9. It looks like it's mostly been torn down now (streetview and satellite show it gone).
I never visited the campus. My next door neighbor worked there (he was a big RF guy and had a a giant shortwave antenna on his roof). They also employed so many people that they had their own stoplights at their entrance/exit. Plus the city convinced them to do staggered start/end times for their employees as to not flood the roads around the building.
From my outsider view, it seems the companies who really invest in R&D make the best things happen. Unfortunately the best doesn't always mean the most long term successful (depends on many many more factors than just the quality of the product).
I would love to see a world where it was fashionable for companies to proudly devote 20+% to R&D. It seems instead like R&D is 2% at best, and marketing (or legal... patents) is 18%.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: apparently Nokia bought out Siemens years ago
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.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.as...
I don't know how Motorola could have been fixed though.
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.
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.
Accounting tricks aside, they didn't lose money on the downfall.
I worked with a group of them a few years ago. Their skills were shit but they all walked around expecting managerial positions.
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.
For instance Xerox was doing plenty of cool and innovative stuff with GUIs and the mouse but then it was someone like Jobs (and Bill Gates) that turned that into a hot product. Where's Xerox now? Where's Apple?
In engineering we too often forget that sales and marketing are crucial.
[1] www.albertcory.io
Before internet, you marketed by being in the right places with the right people. Now you have to have a global internet strategy and compete with companies who have nothing but marketing (and funding).
Or this being every corporate HQ because of the collapse of Western Capitalism in the face of global warming.
I'm sure life will go on though.
The non-agricultural, non-forestry parts of the California economy can do just fine on desalinated seawater.
“there were old wall slogans inside that must have been added to motivate and inspire the employees” … “ the tall building had several brick structures on the lower main level. He suspected that those structures probably had plants and ferns in them so that important business clients and employees would be met with a pleasing sight upon entering.” … “Martin Gonzalez also noticed pictures of people using Motorola products that had been left on the walls of the building.”
Indeed, the ways of the people of the Motorola civilization of around 2011CE are mysterious and strange to us. Perhaps the central atrium served some kind of ritual purpose? Were prisoners perhaps thrown off the upper balconies as a sacrifice to their gods? We will never really know.
Okay so this is a cult.
Put the book down and spent remaining career avoiding anyplace that mentioned it.
But it's true. Citizens of those ancient Egyptian cities probably did roll their eyes at some of the wall hieroglyphs.
Especially because the pharaohs exaggerated their victories.
And the priests probably made up ridiculous stories of what their gods "did" and "accomplished"
Some citizens were probably just as incredulous as we are today.
Ramses II exaggerated even his defeats, that is, he claimed that as his victories. For example the famous wall relief of Ramses II slaying the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh. https://www.memphis.edu/hypostyle/tour_hall/ramesses_ii_scen...
In reality it was a terrible defeat and it allowed the Hittites to limit Egypt sphere of influence to no further West than Canaan.
Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, 1978
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/...
Today they are still active in Medical, TVs and light, a faint shadow of what they used to be.
Edit: this comment is false. Please ignore.
(Given that this is in my country and in my field of interest that's a pretty good indication of how big of a miss this is, so thank you for the correction.)
I remember after that their consumer electronics got really, really bad. Basically all their products were just... not finished. The firmware on most of their devices was just terribly buggy, and features advertised on the box where sometimes not even available. I remember having an MP3 player where selecting the FM radio mode would just crash the device. Never did they release a firmware version that would enable FM radio mode. I had to carry a small metal pin in my wallet, just to be able to use the reset button behind a tiny hole in the side of the MP3 player. I usually had to reset it once or twice a day.
I also had a media streamer that did not work at all out of the box, it just didn't support any of the advertised codecs. And I had a Phlips TV that would reliably crash when switching from TV mode to Teletext mode.
Living in the Netherlands, I felt kind of obligated to choose Philips over brands such as Samsung. However, many times I found myself returning a Philips appliance, and buying a Korean/Japanese made alternative instead.
Never, ever again will I trust them for consumer electronics.
And given how much goodwill that brand had it is very impressive how fast it was run into the ground. I still see their TVs for sale here, and medical devices and some stuff for infants.
Basically they are banking on their previous glories and advertising.
Sometimes you can spot the exact same product from a noname manufacturer, it's just missing the right sticker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senseo
They have been slowly getting out of the consumer business for a long time. They just recently spun off their remaining consumer appliances business after having spun off lighting some years ago.
“We advance humanity.”
I guess the message is, don’t take yourself too seriously, most of where companies succeed is happenstance. It still takes a moment to all visitors to understand that it can’t be serious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_Eternal
We are innovative. We constantly create ingenious solutions to the real challenges of today, tomorrow and beyond.
We are passionate. We meet every challenge with energy and determination, always pursuing ever-higher standards.
We are driven. We keep it simple by focusing on what matters most so we can seize opportunities with speed and confidence.
We are accountable. We stand behind the work we do, the contributions we make and the high business standards we maintain.
We are partners. We succeed together because we respect all individuals and value contributions from colleagues and customers alike.
https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel...
Multiple sacrificial altars surrounded by balconies from which the faithful could watch.
https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-03-02
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831
If they ever filmed a movie version of that game (which they probably shouldn't, as it could never do the game justice), they should do it at that location...
https://www.abandonedamerica.us/bell-labs
https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/
Not to its full, old glory, but at least it is not abandoned anymore.
They became complacent, they abandoned their technical leadership for bean counters, and became dust.
Intel was almost going down that road.
There's been some very hard years in between and it's a smaller company now, but it's actually doing very well by many standards.
https://www.iparkcampus.com/available-space/
I was in Google Patents and I interviewed people for the position of "acquirer of patents." This was a period when they actually thought the "throw weight" of your patent portfolio really mattered in cross-licensing deals. Most of those patents were utterly worthless in any sort of deal.
Google stock was eventually included in his compensation package, though. I can imagine that eased some of the worry.
Could anyone expand on this? Sounds interesting, and I know little about it.
The graphs of who was suing whom are hilarious by today's standards,.
I'm not familiar with that particular case, but I really doubt that a clip from 2001 was dispositive of anything. Unless the patent really was as broad as "a flat computing device."
I guess I can go look up that design patent now. It's entirely possible that 2001 did anticipate the look of the iPad, but we can also look at the record of the trial to find out how this played out.
Also, yes, you're right, forgot some key details after the 10 years. Can't believe it was that long ago.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4178089/apple-inc-v-sam...
I know this case continued up to at least 2015, since that was when I went to watch for a day. When I went, there were some utility patents at issue.
This is an exaggeration of course, but perhaps not far off the mark.
Cross-licensing deals are immensely complicated. You have to think about indemnifying the partners, in particular. I actually sat in the Apple v. Samsung trial for one day, because Google was indemnifying Samsung, as they frequently do for Android partners.
A big problem with Motorola was: they actually make the hardware, so Google was being sued directly. The patent infringement suits are usually against the company that makes the device.
So I bought one, and I really liked it - I got regular OS updates (unlike many Android licensees), the phone had a gorgeous walnut veneer back, and it fit well in my hand. Nice.
If anything Nokia cocked up, they made a phone so good I haven't seen the need to upgrade and since it's AndroidOne I'm still getting updates.
I had to laugh at the clear piss take of the Jonny Ive Apple videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJitfThItk at the time it got my attention and they are that tough.
8000 miles on a motorcycle handlebar mount and it looks like it came out the box.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k3Kc0avyDJ2nG9Kxm9JmQ
Now that I fact check myself, Qualcomm isn't based in Scandinavia like I thought, but rather San Diego. I guess I just mix all hot-hardware companies of the '90s in with Ericsson!
What next??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI
Here are some pictures from Fukushima:
https://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima-8-years-on/