In the year 2000,
Motorola was monumental.
With a market value of nearly $80 billion
and a slew of high-tech acquisitions and new products on the horizon,
they seemed unstoppable.
But by 2009,
things had gone so wrong so fast,
that the company's value had plummeted to levels unseen in years.
And by 2011, they had to sell off the company in chunks
to the highest bidder.
For a business that had been around since the early 20th century,
and had survived economic hardships, multiple wars
and even an unsolved murder,
this was an ending that few saw coming.
What happened?
This is LGR Tech Tales,
where we take a look at noteworthy stories of technological inspiration,
failure and everything in between.
The episode tells the tale of the telecommunications giant
known as Motorola.
Motorola's story begins well before the age of cell phones
and telecommunications equipment that they were known for in the 2000s.
To tell their tale, we need to go all they way back to 1921,
to the city of Marshfield, Wisconsin.
Engineer Paul Galvin and his friend Edward Stewart
started a battery company in Marshfield that year,
after having worked for another battery manufacturer some years prior.
Marshfield was selected because of a deal they worked out with the local chamber of commerce,
but before long it proved disadvantageous due to
poor and costly shipping options in the area.
By 1923, the company went of out business,
and after a short stint working at a local candy company,
Galvin and Stewart began another battery business,
this time in the heart of Chicago.
The location was fantastic for shipping
but soon a major defect was discovered in their batteries,
and before this could be fixed,
their credit ran out and their assets were seized.
However, Mr. Galvin was not giving up,
because before the company shut down
they were developing something called a "dry battery eliminator."
The concept seems simple today,
but it let you take a home radio,
plug it into an electrical socket,
and accept electricity directly from the grid,
no battery required.
The creditors now owned the rights to this device,
but they were going up for auction in the fall of 1928,
and Galvin went for it.
He won back all rights to the eliminator for $750
and promptly founded yet another company in Chicago,
this time with his brother Joe,
called the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation.
All they made at first was the battery eliminator, but
finally it seemed that luck was on their side.
The eliminator did well enough to make a decent profit,
and they used that money to build something new in 1930
that would change the course of the company's history.
This was the Motorola Radio,
the first mass-produced commercial radio made specifically for automobiles.
The Motorola name was meant to imply "sound in motion,"
with "motor" bringing to mind cars and movement
and "ola" being inspired by the names of
similar audio devices on the market,
like the Radiola and the Victrola.
Galvin Engineering was profitable enough
to break even after a year of selling the new radio,
and eventually the success prompted a name change.
From 1947 onward, the company would be known simply
as Motorola.
But even with the Motorola device taking off,
it was no smooth sailing.
For one thing, the Great Depression was ongoing in the early 30s,
so sales were never exactly booming.
Then in 1933, a new Motorola model was introduced
but with tons of problems,
which resulted in them having to recall thousands of units.
There was no use complaining about it, though,
and Paul Galvin just piled up the recalled units
and smashed them with a sledgehammer.
Besides, two new models were on the way for 1934 without the earlier issues,
and the business was getting back on track.
In 1936, they introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser radio receiver,
which was a one-way radio designed to receive police broadcasts.
Then in 1940, they released the SCR-300 and SCR-536 two-way radios,
the Handie-Talkie and what is colloquially known as the walkie-talkie.
With the international conflict of what would become World War II on the horizon,
Galvin's company was in a lucrative position,
since the walkie-talkie
was a vital piece of kit.
However, the next few years were rather grim.
I'm not just talking about the war.
The company was doing fine,
but life at home was another story.
Paul Galvin's wife, Lillian, and their maid, Edna,
were both murdered
by an unknown intruder in their home,
while Paul was away in Washington on a business trip.
The murderer was never found
and the crime remains unsolved to this day.
And soon after that,
Joe Galvin died,
leaving Paul's son, Robert, as the sole heir to the company.
But even under the shadow of these tragedies,
Motorola continued to grow throughout the '40s,
introducing their first television in 1947,
and then the germanium transistor for car radios in 1955.
Alongside Paul stepping down as president,
and his son, Robert, taking over in 1956,
this transistor proved to be a turning point for Motorola.
While had been kind of hesitant to enter this emerging market,
Robert was a firm believer in the new tech.
Transistors were rapidly replacing vacuum tubes
and gobbled up far less in terms of power and space.
This led to smaller, more capable electronics,
like their 1960 Astronaut television,
which was the first large-screen transistorized cordless portable TV.
It also allowed for smaller and more powerful radio transponders,
like the Motorola radios famously used by Apollo astronauts
to communicate with Earth from the Moon.
And after the space race came a new era in computing,
spurred on by the commercial introduction of the microprocessor.
Of course, Motorola had their own take on the microprocessor in 1974,
the 8-bit MC6800.
Not only was this an important chip in its day,
being used in everything from industrial equipment to communication systems,
but its development led to the iconic MOS Technology 6502,
perhaps a story for another day.
Around the same time the microprocessor was taking off,
Motorola started work on what would become the first portable cellular telephone.
In April of 1973, they made the first calls using a system called DynaTAC,
or Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage,
in New York City.
It took a while for the technology to improve enough
to become viable for the commercial market,
but in 1984, the Motorola DynaTAC phone was released to the public.
This was the beginning of a new era for the company.
Gone were the car radios of old.
They stopped making those in 1987.
It was the late-20th century telecom and personal computer revolution,
spearheaded by Motorola's brick cell phones,
the powerful and omnipresent 68000 series CPU,
and beltclip pagers.
Yes, pagers,
or beepers as some called them,
which Motorola introduced in 1986 with the Bravo,
a model that would soon become the number one pager in the world.
They especially became associated with doctors in the later years,
but for a while in the '90s, they were the must-have fashion item
for anyone that was technologically inclined or just wanted to look awesome.
It took a bit more time for cell phones to catch on to the same degree,
but once the logistics were sorted and the electronics matured,
Motorola was once again the cream of the crop.
By 1994, 60% of the mobile phones sold in the United States
were made by Motorola,
and it looked like they could not be beaten.
Ah, but if it weren't for those meddling kids at Nokia!
Due to a combination of cell phone service partnerships,
keeping manufacturing costs low and
going with bomb-proof build quality,
Nokia surpassed Motorola
as the most popular manufacturer of cell phones in 1998.
And while they may have lost the cell phone battle to Nokia,
Motorola still managed to grow to their highest valuation ever in 2000
at $78.5 billion.
This was partially due to Robert Galvin's son, Chris Galvin,
who became CEO in 1997.
By focusing on emerging technologies like GPRS
and making key acquisitions like the buyout of General Instrument for an $11 billion stock swap,
Motorola was in a good position to dominate the 2000s.
The problem...
was the 2000s.
First, there was the tech and dot-com bubble burst,
which tore Motorola's stock down by 40 percent
in a few short years.
Then the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City and the SARS scare
put a huge damper on the company's international supply chains.
In 2001 alone, Motorola's revenues plunged by nearly $8 billion,
56,000 employees were let go and plants were closed all over the place,
and it culminated with Chris Galvin
being shown the door in January of 2004.
But just months later,
a project that Chris Galvin had been overseeing hit store shelves:
the Razr V3 flip phone,
which once again led Motorola to capture the imagination
and the wallets of the mainstream public in a big way.
Its aluminum body was stylish, lightweight and straight up cool,
and a lot like the pagers of the '90s, everyone just had to have one.
Motorola Razrs were the must-have item,
selling over 130 million units altogether,
and the company rose back up to a $53 billion market cap
by 2006.
Ah, but if it weren't for those meddling kids at Apple!
Storming onto the scene with the iPhone in June of 2007.
It's amusing in hindsight, but
critics were quick to dismiss the costly device,
but once it became the best-selling phone worldwide a few years later,
everyone's tone quickly changed.
Motorola was slow to adapt to this cataclysm in the marketplace,
and it's no coincidence that after 2006
the company's valuation took a nosedive,
resulting in a restructuring announcement in 2008.
In 2009, Motorola introduced their Droid smartphone,
by working closely with Google and using the Android operating system.
Thanks to this device, the phone division was making a profit by 2010.
And it might have stayed that way if it weren't for those meddling kids at Samsung!
The dominance of their Galaxy line of Android phones
all but shut Motorola out of the smartphone market.
And in 2011, the company split announced during the restructuring of 2008 took place,
which resulted into them turning into Motorola Mobility,
the mobile phone company,
and Motorola Solutions,
the enterprise and radio communication company.
By August of the same year, the Mobility company ended up being acquired by Google,
with Lenovo then purchasing it from Google in 2014.
The Solutions company, which many consider the true successor to the Motorola of old,
continues to operate of out Chicago,
although large portions of the business have been sold off to various companies,
like Zebra Technologies.
And that's the story of Motorola.
A larger than life pillar in the realm of business and technology,
foiled by everything from internal struggles
to the world stage at large.
It may no longer be the family-run company
it was for the better part of the 20th century.
Indeed, it is no longer a unified company at all.
You may still see products bearing the Motorola name out there,
with Mobility making Lenovo phones
and Solutions making radios for UK emergency services under Airwave,
but the old school Motorola is long gone.
Their story remains to be learned from, though,
with the insurmountable odds the company faced
and the far-reaching influence they had becoming the stuff of legend.
And without them,
there's no telling what the tech world would look like today.
♪♪
And, yeah, it doesn't look like they're gonna be re-releasing the Razr at all,
even though those videos a little while back seemed to imply that.
Oh, well!
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