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Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

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Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#161
post #16

Earlier 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.

There are pockets of ex-Moto software engineers that have splintered off from Libertyville and/or Mart that still continue to contaminate the tech scene in Chicago. I worked with a group of them a few years ago. Their skills were shit but they all walked around expecting managerial positions.

That's a pretty bold comment for such a large site... did you have any good experiences with other folks from Moto?

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#162
post #120

I recall when IBM left Boca Raton, Florida (where the PC was invented) in the mid-90s. About a year after they left, a few friends and I roamed the abandoned IBM facility [1] and it was odd seeing empty computer rooms sans the raised floors. Some of the resulting pits were six feet deep (2m). Crazy. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/CKrEbTkRDwWQNc2d8 Yes, it's a huge hexagon shaped building.

This is over by Florida Atlantic University, originally built to be a lot harder to get into than most well-known institutions at the time. Didn't offer much undergraduate, just upper level only for top transfer students.

Things have changed, the campus plus the airport were a former airbase carved out of the wilderness and used during the Cuban Missle Crisis.

Boca was a small resort town on the coast and you had to go way west of town into the boonies before you came upon FAU out in the woods. Go much further west and it was basically everglades after that.

One summer as a teenager a buddy and myself were riding horses about that far west of Boca Lake. Nothing but pines & palmettos for miles, it would not be fun to try and hike it because you need to be up on the horse to see over the palmettos.

But this was not like any other summer. We came upon an unfamiliar clearing.

As we got closer it loomed larger, it was zero vegetation, nothing but dirt with the rest of the woods still there as a wall on the other side of the field.

We rode on out into the cleared land, this was no farm, you could see for miles to the north and south, yes we were in the middle of I-95 on horses, but no worries we were the earliest passenger traffic and there was no pavement or any way to get there by car yet.

Well when they built the IBM location it was widely known to be for secret projects, so it was recognized to be appropriate for it to be like the Pentagon, except of course a hexagon instead.

My grandma wanted me to work there, some of her clients knew some of the secrets, she was a fortune-teller.

I went to the university instead.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are pockets of ex-Moto software engineers that have splintered off from Libertyville and/or Mart that still continue to contaminate the tech scene in Chicago. I worked with a group of them a few years ago. Their skills were shit but they all walked around expecting managerial positions.

That's a pretty bold comment for such a large site... did you have any good experiences with other folks from Moto?

The hardware engineers, especially the RF guys, were stellar.

I also worked with a group that spun out of Paging down in Florida and helped design XM Radio's transmission protocol. That was a neat design.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't patent a "concept." You patent an invention . I'm not familiar with that particular case, but I really doubt that a clip from 2001 was dispositive of anything. Unless the patent really was as broad as "a flat computing device."

https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-says-2001-a-space-odyssey-...

This was a design patent, not a utility patent. That means they patented the look of the tablet, meaning the non-functional parts. They did not have a patent on the "concept of a tablet."

I guess I can go look up that design patent now. It's entirely possible that 2001 did anticipate the look of the iPad, but we can also look at the record of the trial to find out how this played out.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-says-2001-a-space-odyssey-...

This was a design patent, not a utility patent. That means they patented the look of the tablet, meaning the non-functional parts. They did not have a patent on the "concept of a tablet." I guess I can go look up that design patent now. It's entirely possible that 2001 did anticipate the look of the iPad, but we can also look at the record of the trial to find out how this played out.

If you know how to find the outcome of this particular legal argument I'd be very happy to read it :). I was studying at the time and a lawyer that was teaching us the basics of copyright and patent law told us about the then ongoing case.

Also, yes, you're right, forgot some key details after the 10 years. Can't believe it was that long ago.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#166
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most cringey one to me is the Philips one "Let's make things better". Funny enough their slide down into relative obscurity started right after introducing that slogan. Up to that point they were one of the powerhouses of technology. Today they are still active in Medical, TVs and light, a faint shadow of what they used to be.

After 2004, they ditched that slogan and started using "Sense and Simplicity" as their new slogan. I remember after that their consumer electronics got really, really bad. Basically all their products were just... not finished. The firmware on most of their devices was just terribly buggy, and features advertised on the box where sometimes not even available. I remember having an MP3 player where selecting the FM rad…

Same here, every Philips device bought after the mid 90's was junk. At some point they even couldn't make vacuum cleaners that worked or fridges that didn't fail completely within the warranty. Which is also why plenty of the bigbox outlets stopped offering their stuff, the quality was just incredibly bad.

And given how much goodwill that brand had it is very impressive how fast it was run into the ground. I still see their TVs for sale here, and medical devices and some stuff for infants.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#167

It is being demolished now. The company doing the demolition must be very proud of destroying things, because they make drone & time-lapsed videos of it: https://johlerdemolition.com/portfolio-items/motorola-schaum... Edit: I meant this in a positive tone, not a negative. I'm glad they take pride in their work.

Random tangent: This is the most bizarre thing I've seen in a while. At the bottom of the page is a "Protected by Recaptcha" logo that follows the page around. Clicking on it does nothing and no Recaptcha is displayed. What is it supposedly protecting and how is it doing that protecting if no Captcha is displayed? (I browse privately and am constantly hit with Captchas, but this one didn't prompt me.)

Recaptcha version 3 doesn't need to show you a CAPTCHA. It just calculates a score in the background, and of course it's up to the website to determine what to do with this score.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't they take pride in their work? Its honest and important work. Not every building can/should be preserved, tearing down these structures is important to remove dilapidated safety hazards and/or build something new

I didn't mean it negatively. I wrote it with a smile. They should take pride in their work!

A few years ago they were demolishing a building across from my office. They had various demolition equipment, mainly big backhoes including some equipped with grabbing. They were taking their time ripping stuff apart, and then sorting through what they'd broken off to separate out all the rebar and other metal.

What I liked was, at the end of each day, the crew lined up all the equipment and put each in what I would call a "majestic" pose, like with its arm looking purposeful. I thought it gave a cool, and professional look to the construction site, and showed they obviously cared about what they were doing, to clean up and pose the equipment, vs just leaving it where it was when the shift ended.

Re: Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That included a row over the generic concept of a tablet, where in defense the Samsung lawyers brought up prior art ... from the Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". The astronauts in the movie are using something that looks just like a tablet.

You don't patent a "concept." You patent an invention . I'm not familiar with that particular case, but I really doubt that a clip from 2001 was dispositive of anything. Unless the patent really was as broad as "a flat computing device."

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