I was at Motorola from 90-98. I recall that they were a bloated engineering bureaucracy that didn't understand software at all. The other thing is everyone knew Chris Galvin was going to run the company. Lots of executives left during that period. Finally, the iPhone killed everybody: Nokia, Ericsson, Blackberry. It was inevitable. When markets make big shifts, big companies can't adapt.
However the mid 2000s were the period of the highly successful Razr series which is still the #1 clamshell phone to date in terms of sales numbers. The very first Android phones weren't that bad either.
The RAZR succeeded on design, the software sure wasn't the key attraction of that device. Motorola's phone O/Ses (yes, plural) were all very underpowered.
Something the Chicago Magazine article doesn't really mention is the death of Geoffrey Frost in 2005. Frost spearheaded the RAZR's marketing and started to turn Moto's fortunes around in the early 2000s. After Frost passed, things went rudderless on the eve of the iPhone and Android.
"He also had spun an appealing narrative about how Motorola was cool again, and a myth about the slick downtown Chicago design studio where the phone had taken shape." (Which never existed)
> The RAZR succeeded on design, the software sure wasn't the key attraction of that device.
Yup. Synergy was probably fine for little B&W lcd screen devices, but they kept hacking onto it...
> Motorola's phone O/Ses (yes, plural) were all very underpowered.
Supposedly the Razr could have had longer legs as well, if they had overhauled it more quickly, rather than tiny tweaks. Don't have the link about that one handy though.
