I feel a bit silly now that I always thought Motorola was an Asian company.
Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#52Now do the Libertyville office.
How about the Quincy office, near where Wavering worked and near where he and Lear were each born before making the product that would be the name of the company? Even the last little local sales office closed years ago.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Zurich building on the campus is pleasant on the eyes even thought they are a not so good employer, and they have a Top Golf now (some /s intended).
The Zurich building looks like mega sized shipping containers. (I know - that is the intended design look). My aunt worked for Zuirich for almost 20 years (in the towers), never heard anything extraordinarily bad other than normal employee grumblings.
It's a great landmark from the freeway.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#54Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#55It'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…
I remember reading about that! Strange times.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#56It'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…
My dad worked for a division of Motorola that was bought by Google and it sure felt like, during that time, if you were working for Motorola you could be laid off at a moment's notice.
Google stock was eventually included in his compensation package, though. I can imagine that eased some of the worry.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#57It'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…
Precursor to the NFT craze..
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#58Brought to mind the famous video by Dave Haynie about the last days of Commodore and their then almost empty fab in West Chester, PA, just days before the bankruptcy ended it all. If you want an account on how it feels when it's happening, that's probably the video to watch. Contains some interesting vintage technical stuff too.
As an old Amiga user, It makes me both sad and angry every time I watch it.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#59If you find any 68040s in there, gimme.
Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Iridium wasn't a sell-off. Motorola was one of the largest investors in Iridium, and lost a vast amount of money when it went bankrupt. Additionally they were deeply involved in its hardware.
The second incarnation of the Iridium corporation we know now is the group of people who bought it at pennies on the dollar in the bankruptcy auction.