The Evolution of Motorola Phones

De-paywall-ed: https://archive.is/0LWYb

The StarTAC's antenna was a bit flimsy but the form factor and battery life (in comparison) were top notch compared to most other phones of that time.

It's not talked about much, but RAZR was a skunk works program inside of Moto started by a small group of engineers independent of management. By that point the company had been largely taken over by cost cutting style management. Lean/6 Sigma was everywhere, and pretty much all research/innovation centres were being shut down. C level was incredibly incompetent. Ed Zander, the most incompetent choice of all, was appointed as CEO in 2004.

The company basically looked like it was gonna die any day. Then RAZR happened. The swaths of incompetents had no idea how to leverage the success, but oh man they were able to spend great swathes of money on terrible ideas over the next few years.

Probably the pinnacle of this incompetency was collaborating with Steve Jobs on the first iTunes enabled phone (ROKR). Basically Moto management opened the doors to Apple/Jobs on how to build cell phones - gave full access to Apple's engineering teams with virtually no upside for Moto but lots for Apple.

RORK was a dud. Then iPhone came out a couple years later. I still remember the COO/CEOs downplaying it in town halls, saying things like "Where's the keyboard! No one is ever going to use a touch screen based device!". Of course, all the engineers knew the writing was on the wall - the iPhone was amazing.

Even by today's standards, the RAZR is a marvel of engineering and industrial design. It's insane how thin it is for 2004 considering the swappable battery and dual display.

Only thing holding it back was the sluggish SW and terrible UX, but that plagued most phones of the era.

>C level was incredibly incompetent.

Please name me a major western consumer electronics company of the era other than Apple that didn't have incompetents at the helm.

Nortel, Nokia, Blackberry, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel, Philips, all these phone makers are extinct. They all failed to see the writing on the wall that mobile HW is becoming a commodity and the SW and UX will make the difference. The original iPod proved this. It was built with off-the-shelf parts that every hardware maker had access to. Same with the original iPhone. Just off-the-shelf parts and the secret sauce was in the SW not the HW.

It feels like the only way to get to C level is to be as incompetent as possible.

I wish the CEO's had been right. Keyboards > touchscreens.

The iPhone allowed normies to ruin everything. Instead of programs, we have apps. Instead of websites, we have walled gardens. Instead of bbs systems and forums, we have IG, Facebook and TikTok. Blame the normies.

Edit: Your downvotes mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes you upvote.