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Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

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Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#41

Post by blacksmith_tb »

jameshart wrote: post #17

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…

David Macauley's _Motel of the Mysteries_ is the model for all funny/profound archaeology of the present, I'd say.

https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel...

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#42

Post by AlbertCory »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #31
blunte wrote: post #10

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 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 to…

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.

[1] www.albertcory.io

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#43

Post by ansible »

pfdietz wrote: post #16
blunte wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Yes.

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.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#44

Post by gumby »

pfdietz wrote: post #20
jameshart wrote: post #17

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…

Archaeologists have found inscriptions referring to the cult of "Six Sigma", which is hypothesized to be a primitive form of ritual statistical magic.

A wonderful example of the cargo cult phenomenon!

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#45

Post by AlbertCory »

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.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

pfdietz wrote: post #20
jameshart wrote: post #17

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…

Archaeologists have found inscriptions referring to the cult of "Six Sigma", which is hypothesized to be a primitive form of ritual statistical magic.

[deleted]

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#48

Post by derekp7 »

selfsimilar wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#49

Post by cestith »

pfdietz wrote: post #16
blunte wrote: post #10

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…

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.

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.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#50

Post by thrdbndndn »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #31
blunte wrote: post #10

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 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 to…

At least Xerox is still alive and a industry leader in printer business.
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