John Linton Never mind the Chrysler bankruptcy and the GM share price - they are almost inevitable because those two companys, between them, make all the worst cars in the world and someone, presumably the US car buying public, finally noticed....it's therefore understandable. But this, at least to me, isn't:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124109071922972829.html
Sure mobile handset sales are down significantly and Motorola's handsets haven't kept their appeal over the last year or so but that isn't the whole of Motorola's business activities. The Motorola I remember (from my boyhood if you count the early transistor radios of the 1950s as 'a technology product') was an electronics innovator across a wide spectrum of product and industry types who made some of the very best technology products I was aware of over the years.
Motorola had the dream that was the Iridium project - the first concept of a truly worldwide mobile telephone service using 77 LEOs (hence the name Iridium for that element's atomic number). That fantastic project almost sent them bankrupt trying to make that quantum leap in mobile phone and data technology viable but, alas, they were some 20 years before their time. and wrote it all off when they couldn't solve the hanset size and aesthetics and had cost over run problems.
I first visited Motorola in the 1970s at their head office in Schaumberg Illinois but my fondest memories are from the very early 1980s of their Tempe Arizona R and D facilities for wireless products and high end computers. I saw the initial pans for Iridium there but mainly I was looking at their 'campus' style wireless networking products. They were trialing true high speed wireless networking while 'over the border' Bob Metcalfe was showing the world (including me) the advantages of thick Ethernet networking in the start up days of 3Com. So Motorola were already developing 'wifi' while Metcalfe was still struggling to make the world understand the concept of connecting hundreds of computers together over one 'piece of wire' talking to each other via some esoteric concept of 'collision detect'.
So I associate Motorola with wireless innovation for the past three decades and it's sad to see such an amazingly innovative company falling on hard times when such a company should be doing so well. One more reminder that its engineers and 'risk takers' that drive the communications industry not financial controlers and "I only owe a duty of care to my shareholders" CEOs.....or far worse....governments that think they can correctly call technology futures...come to think of it....it explains Australia's current situation.
In 'past lives' I have wasted a lot of years in my attempts to innovate in technology with the 'grand vision' concepts of doing things in and for Australia that would be truly beneficial to the country of my adoption. Predictably, those efforts ended badly for everyone concerned and it's a long time since I have thought about taking the sorts of risks required to make even a tiny dent in the development of advantageous technology in this country. For every Microsoft and Intel there are hundreds of thousands, almost certainly millions, of start up failures - irrespective of how innovative, and useful, their ideas, technology and go to market dreams were.
So I feel sadness when I read articles like the one I've referenced but it reminds me that I was very foolish to make my own pathetically small and woeful attempts to bring new technologies to Australia and to attempt to make financial sense of those attempts. It may mean I learned one lesson over the decades though, in participating in the start up of Exetel, I certainly haven't remembered the other, incredibly painul, lesson I thought I had learned which was NEVER AGAIN be involved in the ownership or start up of a small technology business in Australia. Some, really stupid, people never learn.
I remain concerned at the likely financial problems that seem to be widely predicted for later this year in Australia and I endlessly look at our own small company's plans for the coming months and the 'pointers' of future performance in the monthly results for the previous 10 months of the current financial year. I simply don't have the knowledge or skills required to make predictions about the financial future for anything including our small company. I can look at our financial plans and see nothing other than growth at profitable levels of whatever we choose to make them - as long as we are sensible in our aspirations.
I can't see where the predicted major problms are going to come from and I don't seem to be able to find anyone with whom we are associated with in business, including our banks and insurers, who is able to provide any better views than those we have formed ourselves. While I am typing this, Whine is on the ABC making his nonsensical claims about what Labor has done and is doing to "protect the jobs of all Australians" and "how clueless the Coalition is about fiscal policy" and I don't get a feeling of having a government that has got a clue - but you may think that is my personal bias - which it may well be but, you know, even in my pig ignorance of matters financial, I can see that spending $A300 billion in the coming years on military toys from the world's armament manufacturers isn't going to help Australians at all and is yet another 'back of the bus ticket' political stupidity.
Back to reality - it seems that we will have to 'wait and see' what's going to happen in Australia and hope that it is going to be no worse than the past recessions (which were truly dreadful for a large number of people) and that we, personally and for Exetel, are able to adapt to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in as the months reveal their secrets.