This article is from the WeChat public account: Advertising Metaverse (ID: dawanglubianjibu) , author: Gu Zi, head picture from: Visual China
Motorola's new headquarters on the 18th floor of the Chicago Merchandise Mart Building, April 2014. A silver-haired Rick Osterloh stood on the podium with a radiant face.
Ten days ago, he was transferred from Google to become Motorola's fourth CEO.
Rick gave a short speech to showcase Motorola's achievements in recent years to the media: "Motorola shipped 6.5 million devices in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 61% over the same period last year." "For Chicago provide more than 2,000 jobs” .
Immediately afterwards, Motorola chief designer Jim Wicks led everyone to visit this newly built office-steel industrial style design, covering an area of 18 acres, walls and corridors dotted with various historical relics, telling With the glory of this century-old brand:
The world's first car radio;
The world's first mobile phone;
Apollo Lunar Warehouse Communication Facility;
100 million flip phones sold worldwide;
and many more……
Everything is so good, as if that near thing doesn't exist:
Three months ago, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, and the handover is expected to be completed in the fall. So Rich is Motorola's "Last Emperor" on Google Singer.
And three years ago, when Google bought Motorola, the number was 12.9 billion.
If the time line is pulled back to 30 years ago, Motorola was the world's largest manufacturer of mobile communication equipment at that time.
From the former King of Glory to "selling out" twice now, what has this giant experienced?
one
In 1928, one year before the Great Depression.
After two bankruptcies, Chicago businessman Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph Galvin founded a third company, the Galvin Manufacturing Company, after the surname. The business is electronic equipment manufacturing.
No Jitailai is probably talking about people like them. Two years after the new company was founded, Paul obtained a technology patent: by eliminating static interference from the hood, Galvin developed the world's first commercial car radio . In June 1930, Paul showed the prototype at the Radio Manufacturers Conference in New Jersey, and orders flooded in immediately.
Paul decided to give the new product a brand name. He took the words " motor" and " victrola " to form a stitched word:
motorola.
Motorola was born, and radio technology became Motorola's flagship product.
In November 1930, Motorola sold a car-mounted radio to the Illinois State Police, which became the precursor to the 911 police communications network that would later spread across the United States.
In 1940, at the invitation of the U.S. Department of Defense, Motorola developed a military handheld walkie-talkie for the U.S. military, which made great achievements in World War II and the Vietnam battlefield after that.
In October 1969, Armstrong took a small step on behalf of humanity on the moon. When his famous words traveled 380,000 kilometers and reached a billion TV viewers, it was Motorola's communicator that carried the radio waves.
Oh yes, the Armstrong seen by a billion people is also partly due to Motorola - in 1963, six years before the moon landing, Motorola developed the world's first TV color picture tube.
And Motorola's most transformative invention is now in your hands.
The 1960s saw a surge in violent crime in Chicago. The police department asked Motorola for help, hoping that they could upgrade the police car communication facilities: so that police officers can not only use the intercom in the car, but also carry it when patrolling away from the police car, so that in the event of an accident, they can come over at any time.
In 1967, a Motorola technician got the idea off the ground: he developed a handheld police-communication device based on a "cellular network." The communicator first transmits signals to the base station, and the base stations then transmit signals to each other. The area covered by a base station is a hexagon in the shape of a honeycomb, and a large number of hexagons are combined to form a "cellular network".
When Robert William Galvin , then the CEO of Motorola and the founder's son, saw the invention, he immediately realized its potential in business - a phone that could make calls to other people anytime, anywhere. , who doesn't want it?
Under Robert's instruction, the company invested 100 million US dollars in research and development funds, and the technician also became the head of Motorola's communications department.
On April 13, 1973, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, a technician held up a talker the size of "two bricks" and dialed Motorola's rival AT&T in front of onlookers:
▲ "Hi, I'm Martin and I'm calling you from a mobile phone."
The technician's name is Martin Cooper, and I don't think I need to mention the name of the thing he invented.
two
In the 1980s, after a setback in entering the Japanese market, Robert noticed the other side of Japan, the great eastern country that was beginning to open its doors.
Robert realized that China's market, once opened, was much larger than Japan's as a whole.
In 1986, Robert came to China. Asked a question: "Does China want to be the world leader in manufacturing? If so, I can help you."
In 1987, the first Motorola factory was settled in Tianjin; in 1992, the factory was completed with an investment of US$120 million in the first phase, with an annual output of 30,000 BP machines. All adopt Motorola technical standards. Motorola is almost hands-on, passing on its mature manufacturing experience and standards to the hundreds of Chinese companies that it cooperates with.
In the same year, Guangdong Province opened the mobile phone service, and China began to have its own mobile network. The "big brother" in the hands of the first batch of 200 users is the "generation of magic machine" MOTO dynaTAC-8000x.
And what really makes Motorola a god is a "space dream".
In 1945, science fiction writer Arthur Clark first proposed the idea of "launching a signal receiver into space to realize global communication" in "Extraterrestrial Communication". After that, the use of satellite communication has become the dream of countless telecom people.
In 1985, three Motorola engineers set out to make this dream a reality.
According to their calculations, if the satellite were flying in low-Earth orbit 800 kilometers above the ground, the cell phone signal would be sufficient to connect to the satellite directly through the atmosphere and reduce the communication delay to an acceptable level.
As long as a sufficient number of satellites are launched, in theory, users can directly call anyone in the world, whether it is on the top of Mount Everest or in the depths of the Sahara Desert.
The required number of satellites was 77 (it was later confirmed that 66 would be sufficient) , exactly the same as the atomic number of the element iridium. So this program was called " Iridium Communications (Iridium Communications) ".
Even looking back in 2021, this plan is unrealistic. In a sense, Musk’s Starlink plan can be regarded as the disciple of Iridium.
To this end, Motorola has planned what may be the company's largest global business project to date: more than 5.5 billion in financing, shareholders from dozens of countries around the world, services covering a population of 3.6 billion, and more than 120 countries have approved the iridium business— -60% of the global population in the 1990s.
Every year, Iridium's managers and directors travel to and from dozens of countries, and various languages come and go at the shareholders' meeting, like a "little United Nations".
At that time, the media image of Iridium was even worse than that of Musk’s SpaceX today. The slogan "One Number One Connects the World" was screened by major European and American media, combined with the popular concept of "global village" at the time, making Iridium a sci-fi project representing the future.
The iridium phone has even become a status symbol. A company sales executive took out the iridium phone in a coffee shop in Geneva, and immediately attracted beautiful women to chat up.
In 1997, the iridium project was officially launched. In just one year, all 66 satellites were launched into orbit. Iridium's chief technology officer, Raymond Leopold , said proudly in an interview with the media: " If you believe in God, then Iridium is God's masterpiece through our hands. "
At the time, Motorola was No. 23 on FORTUNE's "Fortune 500" list, with $22 billion in annual revenue and nearly $2 billion in profits. In the United States, 6 of every 10 mobile phones sold are Motorola, and the entire mobile business accounts for more than 65% of the company's profits.
No one denies that Motorola is the king of communications in the world.
But no one thought that it was the last glory of this giant.
three
The first thunderstorm is precisely this iridium project that has attracted countless fans for Motorola.
Bright slogans and ambitious plans obscured a fundamental problem: the market .
When Motorola was immersed in research to send satellites to the sky, the market has changed dramatically.
The cellular digital mobile network, which was not very mature in the 1980s, has evolved to the second generation (that is, 2G network) in the 1990s. The size of the mobile phone has been greatly reduced to one or two hundred grams, and the call cost is only tens of cents. . Stable communication is guaranteed in most cities.
And an Iridium phone costs over $3,000—$3,000 in 1999. Has a huge antenna and a pound body (even with a special suitcase) . A minute's call costs $6 to $30, and all you get is the ability to "call abroad."
The question is, how many people have this need?
What's more troublesome is that there is no room for price reduction at this high price, because Motorola has invested 5 billion in R&D and launch costs, and global marketing alone has burned 140 million. After the system goes online, there are still 45 million maintenance costs per month.
According to Motorola's calculations, Iridium needs to attract at least 1 million consumers and reach $10 billion in annual revenue to be considered a successful project.
The fact is, on the first day of the grand launch of the project, Iridium's managers found that there was not a single consumer in the system - all the online users were internal test users. A few months after the launch, Iridium's users climbed to 3,637 with difficulty.
A month into its launch, Iridium was not even making as much revenue from its phone business as it made from selling themed T-shirts and keychains.
One year after its launch, Iridium lost 1 billion US dollars, and the number of global users was only 55,000.
Like a shooting star, it was only a moment from breaking through the sky to falling into the quagmire.
In August 1999, Iridium Corporation declared bankruptcy. At that time, this was the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the United States, and it may be the fastest bankruptcy of a company of this size - at this time, it was not even two years before the satellites were all launched into the sky.
Motorola has not recovered from this space dream, and bigger blows follow.
In 2000, the famous "Internet Bubble Crash" occurred in the U.S. stock market. A number of Internet technology stocks suffered a panic plunge, and Motorola was not spared; followed by the 9/11 incident in 2001 and the SARS epidemic in 2002, the company's revenue fell. successive setbacks.
In 2001 alone, Motorola's revenue plummeted by nearly $8 billion, with losses approaching $4 billion.
Motorola began to save itself.
Four
The first is to throw out the hot sweet potato of Iridium.
In 2001, the Iridium system was transferred to the US Department of Defense for $25 million in cabbage. For them, making phone calls in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq is a real necessity.
At the same time, the company regrouped and focused on developing a new phone that was thin enough to look cool. So there is this, the MOTO Razr V3 engraved in countless childhood memories of the post-90s generation.
In 2004, the Razr V3 hit the market. It is only 13.9 mm thick, weighs 95 grams, supports Bluetooth 1.2, has a 2.2-inch color screen, and is equipped with a 300,000-pixel camera.
Razr sold 50 million units in its first two years on the market. From its launch in 2004 to its discontinuation in 2008, the Razr V3 sold 140 million units worldwide, making it one of the highest-selling mobile phones in the world.
Motorola has proven itself once again.
——But this time it is not the return of the king, it is just a return to light.
Because of that man, he came.
In 2005, when the Razr was in its prime, a middle-aged bald man in a shirt and jeans visited Motorola to discuss cooperation. He hopes to team up with Motorola to launch a mobile phone that will carry his family's now-popular music business.
In the fall of 2005, the music phone, called the Rokr, went on sale.
The so-called "church apprentice, starved master" is the most perfect footnote to this story.
For Motorola, this cooperation is nothing more than perfecting its product line again; and for the man, this cooperation planted the seed of "making his own mobile phone" in his heart.
Two years later, the man stepped onto the podium, and in the face of enthusiastic fans and eagerly-awaited media reporters, he uttered the world famous saying:
" Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone !"
The iPhone was born, and the era of smartphones began.
Faced with such an unexpected foe, Motorola's reflex arc is like a sloth. Until 2009, the first Motorola phone with Android 2.1 was long overdue, and the iPhone was already killing everyone in North America.
In April 2010, the iPhone, which had been on the market for less than three years, captured 52.81% of the North American market, followed by BlackBerry with 32.81%, and less than 15% of the market was shared by other manufacturers.
Where is Motorola? In that corner - 0.4% share.
It's hard to believe that it used to be the world's No. 1 communications manufacturer.
five
There is an old chicken soup called "character decides success or failure", and it may be appropriate to put it on Motorola.
For a long time, Motorola was alone in the communications market. Therefore, Motorola has cultivated a strong "internal competition" culture.
The CEO encourages different departments to compete with each other for performance and innovation, and the winners can receive additional support from the company and generous bonuses for employees. The treatment of employees in different departments can be described as "win the club and lose the bricks".
On a good level, this has cultivated a strong technological innovation culture within Motorola, and indirectly brewed a series of technological innovations such as mobile phones;
The bad aspect is that it has caused the company to fall into a long-term "internal friction" to a certain extent.
As mentioned earlier, Martin Cooper's first mobile phone was based on a cellular digital network. In fact, the early version of digital cellular technology was developed by Motorola.
Incredibly, the technology department has not shared technology with the mobile phone department for a long time, for fear that the mobile phone department will develop too fast and grab its own performance - this is called the famous "tribal war" in Motorola's history. The two business branches of the same company, but the relationship is like a competitor.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, the competition between analog and digital signals has gradually emerged. In the 1990s, Qualcomm, NEC and other companies developed mature digital signal solutions, and analog signals were gradually eliminated.
Motorola's mobile phone department was unaware of this, and still held on to the analog signal until the market was snatched by Nokia.
The Signal War is just the beginning of Motorola's backwardness, and a series of decision-making mistakes in the future vividly explain what it means to "can't keep up with each step".
In the 21st century, the success of the Razr once gave Motorola the hope of a turnaround, but being too obsessed with the Razr made them miss the opportunity for smartphones.
While the iPhone was conquering North America, Motorola was studying how to make the Razr more "cost-effective" -- in the end, a phone was only $5 in profit. In 2008, Motorola sold dozens of phones—none of which were smartphones.
As an "old friend of the Chinese people", Motorola has gradually ignored the Chinese market. When 3G became popular in China, Motorola didn't follow up with new phones, but instead slashed prices out of stock of old 2G phones.
In 2007, "Motorola China" went bankrupt, and its Chinese market share was eaten by Samsung.
Losing the largest overseas market, Motorola's decline has been irreversible.
In 2011, in order to prevent the declining mobile phone business from dragging down the entire company, Motorola decided to split up: the mobile phone business became an independent "Motorola Mobility" company, and the department that provided communication technology solutions for enterprises set up a separate "Motorola Solutions" company.
Another year later, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Four years later, it was sold to Lenovo for 10%.
Motorola Mobility is still in operation today and just released their new phone not too long ago.
It's just that the throne of the former king of communications may never be regained.
6. Conclusion
"Live to change the world" used to be Jobs' motto. For Motorola, this has been a portrait of most of its life.
Car radios, mobile phones, police communication networks, lunar communicators, color TV sets, cellular digital networks, satellite global communications...
It can be said that in the second half of the twentieth century, a considerable part of modern human society relied on the foundation laid by Motorola. It can even be said that the world would be very different without Motorola.
However, it is as strong as Motorola, but in the end, it has not been able to get rid of the fate of "its prosperity is also booming, and its death is also sudden".
"Seeing him lift up Zhulou, seeing him banqueting guests, seeing his building collapse."
Finally, add an easter egg story:
December 2003, Hainan Island, China.
The then CEO of Motorola, Mike Zafirovski , met a Chinese entrepreneur on a beautiful beach in Hainan. The communications equipment company he founded attracted Mike's interest.
A few weeks later, Mike and the Chinese reached an agreement of intent: Motorola would pay $7.5 billion to acquire his company wholly as a complement to Motorola's core communications business in China.
However, on the eve of the signing, Mike was removed from the board. The new president vetoed the acquisition, citing too high a price.
The entrepreneur ultimately didn't sell his company.
His name is Ren Zhengfei, and the name of his company is Huawei.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-1464980784.
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https://haykha.com/2008/10/01/story-of-iridium/.
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/289838423.
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https://tech.qq.com/a/20190301/007746.htm.
This article is from WeChat public account: Advertising Metaverse (ID: dawanglubianjibu) , author: Gu Zi
