Motorola, Inc.

» see motorola.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph incorporated Galvin Manufacturing in Chicago on 25 September 1928. The first product was a battery eliminator, a box that let a radio built for dry cells run off household current instead. The car radio came next, and the name they printed on it was Motorola: motor, plus the -ola ending that Victrola had already taught American ears to hear as a sound machine. In 1947 the product name swallowed the company name.

What followed was a run of firsts long enough that most of them have been forgotten separately. The SCR-536 Handie-Talkie went to the Second World War in 1941 and came back as the picture everyone has of a wartime field radio. Motorola equipment carried the voice traffic down from Apollo 11. On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper stood on a New York sidewalk with a two-pound prototype and placed the first handheld cellular call, reportedly to a rival at Bell Labs, which is the kind of detail a company usually invents and this one did not have to.

The other half of the business made chips, and for a long stretch it was the more important half. Motorola Semiconductor sold the 6800 and then the 68000, which is the part of the company an engineer meets first and a phone buyer never meets at all. Turkey knew the phone side only. The corporate question of whether one Chicago holding company or two owned the factories was invisible from here, because the name on the handset in the shop window never changed.

The decline had a long runway. Iridium, the satellite phone network Motorola had funded and spun out, filed for bankruptcy in 1999 and took a reported multi-billion dollar write-down with it. The Razr in 2004 sold enormously and then left the company with nothing behind it, and the handset division went back to losing money. Carl Icahn started buying stock and demanding a breakup. On 26 March 2008 Motorola agreed to separate the mobile devices business and hired Sanjay Jha away from Qualcomm to run it. Then the financial crisis arrived and the date kept moving. The split finally executed on 4 January 2011.

~ the record ~

~ what the split actually was ~

The mechanics matter, because they are why the name survives on two buildings. The phone and set-top business was spun out as Motorola Mobility, a new public company. Everything else, the police radios and the enterprise gear, stayed inside the original corporation, which renamed itself Motorola Solutions. On paper the second one is the continuation. In practice the entity that had been Motorola, Inc. since 1947 stopped existing under that name on the same day.

Mobility then had the stranger life of the two. Google bought it in 2012 for around 12.5 billion dollars. It kept the patents and sold the rest to Lenovo in 2014 for roughly 2.9 billion. Motorola Solutions is still listed and still profitable, selling radios to police departments and mines. Neither company is the one that made the DynaTAC.

~ the part engineers remember ~

The 68000 shipped in 1979 and became the processor of the 1980s that was not an Intel part. The original Macintosh ran on one, and so did the Amiga and the Atari ST. Sega put one in the Mega Drive, which means a generation of people who never heard of Motorola spent their childhoods inside its instruction set. The 6809 before it and the PowerPC after it both have their own partisans.

The chip business left in pieces. The discrete and standard-logic group was sold off in 1999 and became ON Semiconductor. The rest was spun out as Freescale on 2 December 2004, which was later taken private and eventually folded into NXP. I do embedded work now, and Motorola still turns up in datasheets and in the lineage notes of parts that are themselves twenty years old.

~ the two halves ~

Motorola is the rare corporate death where nothing looked like it happened. There was no bankruptcy and no fire sale. Two large companies walked out of the building the next morning, both with the word on the sign, and a phone with the batwing logo is still sold in Turkish electronics stores today under a Chinese owner. The company that placed the first cellular call ended in a filing, and the filing is the only place you can see it.

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