In search of seamless mobility - the world according to Ed Zander
Michael Sainsbury
DECEMBER 12, 2006
WHEN long-time Sun Microsystems executive Ed Zander took the reins almost three years ago at telecommunications equipment maker Motorola, the company was in a bit of a mess. Like all its rivals in the multibillion- dollar a year telecommunications industry it had suffered heavily as the dotcom bubble burst, eventually taking the international telco sector with it.
The collapse of vendor finance equipment deals sent major companies such as Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Ericsson very close to the wall.
The submarine cable industry sector went into free-fall amid a sea of bankruptcies.
And a number of European telcos had vastly overpaid for third-generation mobile spectrum, triggering a round of restructuring and belt-tightening.
As a result, hundred of thousands of employees were sacked around the world, including 50,000 at Motorola.
The only bright spot that remained in the ailing sector was the continuing, inexorable rise of mobile phones, a sector in which Motorola was hanging on grimly to the number two spot, behind Nokia.
Three years on, with Motorola's star and share price once again on the rise, The Australian IT caught up with New York-born Zander at the once-every-four-years ITU Telecom conference, the so-called ICT Olympics, which was held outside Europe for the first time, in Hong Kong.
Three years ago you said you didn't know what Motortola stood for. What have you made it mean?
I don't know what we have made it mean, but I think we're at the forefront of this mobile internet revolution - seamless mobility, something we started in 2004. We've been pushing this whole internet thing really hard.
Motorola recently floated off its semi-conductor business. Is there any other re-structuring ahead?
It didn't belong. But I couldn't tell you. I love you guys - I'll tell you right know, we're going to spin off one of our other divisions. But I'm not going to tell our employees yet, I will just tell you, and you can keep it a secret.
Seriously, we bought nine companies this year, mostly small ones, with the exception of Symbol (Motorola paid $US3.9 billion in stock for Symbol Technologies).
Motorola is a company we felt needed to be transformed. It's hard transforming a big, big company. So we're not done yet. It doesn't mean we'll sell or acquire.
We're still redefining our assets. The big thing is what you see here at ITU - its putting in big, big pipes and making these devices much more your next computer, your next internet device. It's going after the home; it's going after police, fire and public safety; it's going after the person. That's it done. Okay, we're done?
At this point Zander turns the interview around. How is your rugby team going?
Oh, not too well, we had a bad tour of Europe but the World Cup's still a year away.
What about cricket?
Actually it's on right now, we look as if we might win.
Zander: You know what? I love sports. I will get up at three in the morning at home and I will watch Irish hurling, I will watch ping-pong -- every sport in the world. But I cannot understand cricket and I've tried. I'll read the paper this morning and I'll see the guy is 346 or whatever and I can't figure it out. But I was checking my phone every second yesterday for the football scores.
So you don't have mobile TV yet?
You're asking an American about this stuff and we're not, you know, the most progressive.
So what puts you in a position to make the stuff and tell people what they want?
I don't. I have the stuff done in China and other places. We're not American. We have 3000 engineers in China; we have 2000 engineers in India. We have people in Poland, Israel and Russia. We have design teams in England working with Vodafone.
What will handsets look like in three years time?
We have differences of opinion in our own company. Some people come from the school of thought of the converged device, one size fits all -- it can do music, it can do video, it does your coffee and whatever. Then there's the school of thought in which you have multiple devices and one phone number. Communications devices will have different forms and be optimised for certain tasks. You're already seeing really, really good single-purpose camera devices that are also phones.
You had an iTunes phone but don't appear to be continuing with that?
iTunes was a service rather than a phone. It was okay. The problem was, not everyone wanted iTunes, especially outside the US. We can't dictate what music service Telstra wants, or anyone else wants.
How important is the design edge, such as the one Motorola got from the Razr phone?
It is important. But as you can see many of our competitors have copied it like a bottle of water. You have to keep on innovating, not only in design, but features, functions and experiences. There's no free lunch. You're not going to be able to design something nobody else has.
Maybe you get one. We have some things we think will be great over the next few years.
But I'm sure Nokia, Samsung and the rest think that they have some stuff as well.
Will the recent Alcatel-Lucent merger and the rise of Chinese vendor Huawei force more mergers in the sector?
What else is there? I don't know what else there is, Siemens has gone.
What about Nortel?
Maybe that one. We bought Symbol and other companies are buying other companies.
As the industry looks to developing nations for the third billion mobile subscribers, how does the industry deal with selling cheaper lower margin equipment and handsets.
It's a challenge. I look at America. We had to get everyone into television sooner or later. Some were black and white, and low cost.
But you have to make the investment. You look at the population of the world and you would have to be nuts not to go after it in an organised fashion. I don't know how to answer that question and I get asked it a lot. So, we shouldn't give phones to the next billions of people?
But you have to answer to shareholders?
Yes, it's hard. Somebody is going to do it.
WiMAX has been hyped a lot, but hasn't delivered. How big and important is it?
So was 3G hyped lot; so was the 2G hyped a lot; Ethernet was hyped lots; the internet was hyped a lot; so were PCs hyped a lot back in 1980s. I know because I talk to my technologists and from the investment by venture capital that this is big. When? I don't know. That doesn't necessarily concern us: its going to happen - 3G happened, the internet happened.
How do you see WiMAX working with the next generation of 3G?
It's all over the map. Some are just aiming the torpedoes and going straight to WiMAX; some are extending on their infrastructure for rural areas; some are doing more limited types of WiMAX. There are metro WiFi networks that could go to WiMAX some day.
There are more entrepreneurs, more people buying spectrum. If you've got the spectrum you have the gold - you have to figure out how to extract it.
The dual-mode phone will be big.
What did your 13 years at Sun bring to his role at Motorola?
This job is going all software now. It's the future. That's one of my big jobs, to get them to understand. It's all about applications and software.
Motorola has been at the forefront of security and emergency forces communications for decades, where is that going?
Data and video, interoperability.
The big breakthrough is asset tracking and sensor-based stuff. We learnt from 9/11 that a couple of things happened. One is the fireman and police went into the building, the cellular system went down because the backbone went down. We thought we were bullet-proof, all of us, and we lost our firemen because we didn't know where they were.
Fast-forward to sometime this year and the firetruck pulls up, puts in mesh networks, self-forming ad-hoc networks. So, in that building on fire, they have their own network. The network is sent back to their headquarters.
The fireman puts on his suit and he has sensors that test his oxygen levels and location. He loses his walkie-talkie, but we know, in the truck, where he is.
The Australian
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