Motorola, the first company to publicly market cellular phones, made its first test call in 1973. Ten years after that, they hit the market.
Starting from 1983, they launched dozens of mobile phones for 15 years. We can call that time the golden age of Motorola.
They were the most popular and most robust player in the market. Not only that, but at some point, their expensive handsets also symbolised social status.
Today, after 49 years of their emergence, we hardly see any of their products. They didn't vanish, but the age-old craze sure did. The rise of Motorola was magnificent, and the fall was drastic too. So what went wrong? Let's have a peek at the tech history.
The decline in sales of Motorola started in the late 2000s. Motorola missed the peak hour of upgrading them to the 3G network. Motorola's biggest customer was the US. At that time, the US didn't think they needed to switch to 3G, nor did Motorola. But rival companies upgraded themselves. You know what happened next. The world switched to 3G.
Here's an interesting fact. Motorola had the chance to buy Qualcomm for less than USD 20 million. It was years ago, and they turned it down!
Motorola needed actually to innovate to keep pace with time. The opponent companies in the market changed their execution quickly as per the customers' demands.
The Chinese companies Realme and Xiaomi started manufacturing budget-friendly products. Those products had higher specs than Motorola. The huge middle-class customers began shifting. So, Samsung also joined the race with their low-budget M series.
On the contrary, Motorola kept promising their customers upgrades, but they never executed that. In such conditions, cracks formed in the trust between seller and customer.
Motorola started as a hardware company. Their product reigned the market at that time. In the middle of the 2000s, a shift came in the tech biz. The control of the tech world went to the hand of software manufacturers. From that point, software started to lead the mobile phone business.
Motorola lagged smartness there. Their product was bulkier than that of other products of the competitors.
In 2011 Motorola faced a huge drop in sales. They had to split into two parts. The Mobility wing was sold to Google first, then to Lenovo after three years.
Motorola is a huge company, yet it is a loose confederation of warring tribes. The tech guy of Moto, Zander, tried to fix it. But the business of electronics is all about being faster. It was already too late.
Motorola lacked a sense of urgency. Instead, they carried out their business at their own pace, where they should have participated in the race with the other competitors.
Motorola brought a revolutionary change in our lives by introducing us to wireless mobile phones. They pioneered an industry of tomorrow but couldn't hold on to their position due to failing to match the dynamism and fast progress of the tech industry. That left a crucial lesson for all the tech companies.
