Motorola's first priority should be to liberate itself from the debilitating grip of the Galvin family. (IMHO, Christopher Galvin didn't earn one cent of his $50 mil. compensation last year.) I also think its handset business is beyond reclamation and should be essentially divested so that Motorola's economic stake in it is minimized. I can tell you from first hand experience that hardly anyone in Motorola's home state uses their handsets. I never see them in local phone retailers. Imagine if Nokia phones were unavailable in Helsinki! I don't know a single person who uses them. (Nokia, of course, is far and away the most popular in this area.) I even know Motorola employee's who prefer not to take the company phones they are offered. This company has been ruined. Unlike GE, none of Motorola's businesses are first or second in their respective industries. I think they should exit the wireless business and reinvent themselves once again as they have done every couple decades or so in their company's history. Motorola's success in the eighties and early nineties inspired management to think they were invincible. I do know that some of their former customers, like AT&T Wireless, shed not a tear for Motorola's troubles.
Motorola bred a culture of arrogance and contempt, and their salesmen had a reputation for being the most unpleasant sons-of-bitches. They used to tell their carrier customers which of their phones to offer. If the carrier refused, Motorola salesmen would threaten that they might not receive the volume of phones they had requested for the all important Christmas holiday season. As soon as Nokia and Ericsson presented a viable option to Motorola as mobile handset suppliers (I'd guess about four years ago), many of their customers left them and have never looked back. In a story in the local paper last year, one AT&T manager essentially said as far as he was concerned it was payback time, to use the local vernacular. Even in Motorola's hometown the media are unsympathetic and I don't detect that their is any public sympathy for them, not one nationalistic tear. |
