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Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

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Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#91

Post by bdcravens »

eigenvalue wrote: post #62
cestith wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yes, and even the legacy business (which makes radios for emergency responders among many other things) has been a great investment. If you bought MSI 10 years ago, you've made just under a 20% annualized return if you reinvested dividends. And ON Semi has been almost as good over the past decade. It's only in consumer cellphones where they did really badly.

Is it common to refer to it as MSI (the stock ticker for Motorola Solutions)? I would think most think of the computer hardware company when they hear that.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#93

Post by caoilte »

bfrog wrote: post #37

Motorola is maybe a telling of how complacency and pure business leadership can lead to a downfall. They became complacent, they abandoned their technical leadership for bean counters, and became dust. Intel was almost going down that road.

Not sure Intel have escaped that fate yet. Ditto Boeing.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#94

Post by eecc »

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.

Skimming your comment I read “ritual sadistic magic”. Funny how the mind wanders

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#95

Post by madengr »

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.

Several black and green "belt" like accessories were found, which we hypothesize were used for sacrificial strangulation to the statistical deity.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#96

Post by KyleBerezin »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #41
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...

This book looks great. I just ordered it, thank you for mentioning it.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#97

Post by caoilte »

xattt wrote: post #12

I’ve been thinking in 50 or 100 years from now, will this be the case for the Apple Starship campus? I’m sure Motorola seemed indomitable at the time of its construction.

It's just as easy to imagine this being most of San Jose because of drought.

Or this being every corporate HQ because of the collapse of Western Capitalism in the face of global warming.

I'm sure life will go on though.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#99

Post by ipieter »

jacquesm wrote: post #84
tpolzer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean its corporate ghost (aka brand name) is still active in these things. Afaik they've divested everything apart from medical.

Light is definitely theirs as well, and even though the TVs and white goods are made abroad they are still just as much Philips's creations as Intel is making CPUs. Edit: this comment is false. Please ignore.

no it’s not. Philips Lighting is split of into a new brand: Signify. They pay to use the Philips name (e.g. for Philips Hue).

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#100

Post by airocker »

I was a junior employee at Mot as my first job in the worst period: 2006-2007. I saw someone in his 50s who had been in Mot forever been shown the door very impolitely. We also saw the team in Urbana Champaign let go because of some differences with the upper management at that time. It was possibly the most crucial team to compete with Apple. The environment was crazy with layoffs every three months and you can imagine what would have been going on there. We used to hear about the big sales parties in foreign locations when all of this was going on. Would have loved to know if the CEO at that time had better options.
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