Justin

Motorola Breakup: The Loss of a Once-Great Company

Looking over MOT's portfolio for the past 10 years or so that I've been in the business, they have generally had one superstar profit and growth engine at a time, carrying the load for a variety of 3rd and 4th place performers. (Quite different from Cisco, Ericsson, or the old Lucent.) The also-ran businesses that I'm thinking of are the chip business, cellular base stations, optical, etc. as well as some big bets that they just couldn't seem to exit in time when the writing was on the wall (Iridium, and soon WiMAX). If you remove handsets, you're left with a host of companies that are mostly reaching a plateau with little growth engine left. And no executives that have fundamental insights and vision for telecom or consumer electronics. It's very sad, indeed. I left the company and did so without any optimism for their future.