Well, Motorola Picked a Great Time to Announce More Layoffs…

Comments

1. This is kind of a worthless comment John . . . any insight to this?? Guess not? Regardless of Steve Jobs’ health, 4,000 hard-working people just lost their jobs because Ed Zander and Greg Brown are the worst CEOs in the history of tech and failed to capitalize on a once-in-a-lifetime technology home run becuse of lack of leadership, vision and a basic understanding of technolgy. How about some reporting on what Zander did with all the RAZR revenue, how Zander made an enemy of Steve Jobs with his “screw the Nano” comment, or how about the fact that Zander knew the the iPhone was coming for 6 months and did nothing to position the company against what would be the first nail in its coffin. Or how a how a once mighty (albeit never well-run) U.S. technology giant is about to disappear . . . or is it just easier to make dumb comments?

   Posted by Hal Jordan at January 14th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
   

2. I’ll try and get to that tomorrow, Hal. In the meantime you’ll find some more analysis — and quite a few more “dumb comments” as well, I’m sure — here.

   This post is probably a good place to start.

   Posted by John Paczkowski at January 14th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
   

3. What we’ve watched happen to this once great company is sad, truly sad. When they hired me as a “fresh out” recent grad engineer 10 years ago, they were the largest private employer here in Arizona, with over 20k employees in this state alone. Things only went downhill from there. There were several big rounds of layoffs even before the tech bubble burst, as the Iridium satellite phone project (for which I was hired) began to have troubles. That project was a technical success, an engineering tour de force, but a financial failure. The vast sums of engineering talent and treasure (billions) that Motorola poured into that boondoggle was later bought by an enterprising buyer for a few cents on the dollar. I escaped layoff by transferring to the government services division, but several friends were not so lucky. My division was later sold to a major defense contractor (where I still work today); the semiconductor division (the same one that lost Apple to Intel’s processors), was spun off. Then layoff after layoff after layoff, and today they’re left with maybe a couple hundred or so employees remaining here in Arizona. Now it sounds like several of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom had already survived ump-teen rounds of layoffs by transferring to Illinois (Illinois!) in order to stay with the company, will soon be on their way out.
   I’ve talked to some of the long-timers here at my current employer, several of whom are also former Motorolans, they all say the same thing: the company’d had its ups and downs, through recessions in the 70’s, 80’s, and the early 90’s, but things really got started on a continuous, steadily downward trajectory after Chris Galvin became CEO in the late 90’s. This grandson of Motorola founder Paul Galvin was appointed CEO in what was perhaps the most bald-faced and ultimately destructive act of corporate nepotism of the last 25 years. His utterly inept leadership literally ran the company straight into the ground. During his tenure, there was constant, daily bad news – I remember it from the time of my hire until my division was sold – indeed it is about all I remember from my time there. His final insult to the company was his selection of Ed Zander as his replacement. A previous poster commented on Zander’s notorious failure to capitalize on the success of the RAZR phone, thereby squandering a golden turnaround opportunity. Well, not only was this *not* Mot’s first epic tech leadership failure, it wasn’t even their first screw-up with respect to a hot cell phone: does anyone remember the awesome StarTAC, the original flip phone? Less than 10 years before the RAZR, Motorola had *the* ‘it’ phone, but then completely blew it when the cellular market went digital and they were too slow to adapt (probably due to the Iridium distraction of that time). A few years later, virtually the exact same mistake which, one supposes, is to be expected when a company has zero corporate memory thanks to a zillion layoffs. Thanks, Chris. I could go on lamenting Mot’s past leadership failures, but readers can simply google “Motorola’s Seven Deadly Sins” for Andy Kessler’s brilliant analysis of the company’s “issues” that dates from 2001 but is, sadly, still apropos.
   I predict that the current economic downturn will actually put Motorola’s agonizingly slow deathwatch on a temporary hold. First, there is probably no money out there with which another company might buy them, as witnessed by their failure to sell the handset division, which has been on the block for several months now. Second, a tech company is only as good as it engineers, most of whom are stuck there for the time being (assuming they’re not laid off) until the economy picks up again. The company will then be finished once and for all – as other tech companies start hiring again, the smart engineers will be outta there, posthaste, since only masochists would work for leadership that has never wasted an opportunity to waste the fruits of their labor.

   Posted by Kenny Stewart at January 14th, 2009 at 9:22 pm