Motorola Wireless Data: The Patience Of Job
By Bill Frezza
Of all the companies pursuing the nascent wide-area wireless data market, none has been as admired, as feared and as absolutely determined as Motorola. Convinced that this market is its birthright, Motorola has pursued countless initiatives to convert the dream of anytime, anywhere computing into a reality. The payoff thus far has been scant, yet the
promise is as alluring as ever. What makes this company so tough, and how is it deploying its resources in a relentless effort to crack open a market that has confounded the best of them?
The key to understanding Motorola is to abandon any idea tha
t this company is a business monolith operating under a unified plan. The company is often described as a "loose federation of warring tribes," and its division managers have a mandate to seek profits wherever they can find them, even if it means competing with other divisions. Success results in advancement; fail and it's off with your head. This breeds extraordinarily tough managers, and only the toughest survive. Potential synergies may be lost, meaning hard lessons are often learned twice, but this inefficiency seems a small price to pay for the ferocious way Motorola attacks new markets and defends its hard-won turf. Given this distributed approach to business development, you would think every unfolding situation would be unique. Yet, watch long enough and consistent patterns are discernible.
When an emerging market or new product category appears on the radar scope, the first groups to respond are usually those that have something to lose--divisions with an established market hegemony, often based
on a history of proprietary products and an intense love-hate relationship with customers. The response usually takes two forms: a quick repositioning of existing product lines to cover the new area, usually accompanied by a preemptive PR barrage announcing ex
citing new products available "real soon now" and second, the dreaded Intellectual Property (IP) defense. At Motorola, "IP" is a verb, and "to IP" someone means to force them to crawl through a minefield of patents. Motorola's patent portfolio is among the widest and deepest in the world, requiring precise navigation to avoid tripping on the arcane claims language that leaves ample room for unpredictable interpretation. Nothing is quite as chilling as receiving the dreaded "letter" from Motorola informing you of potential infringement. Ignore the letter and risk a lawsuit carefully timed to blow up your next round of financing. Reply, and you will find more and more of your top management's time and energy absorbed in no-win negotiations.
Yet defens
e is only a small part of the equation--a holding action that buys time to come up with a credible counterattack. In cases where the invader survives the first round, the quickie PR illusion is methodically backfilled with real products and services, rarely delivered on schedule but always aggressively supported.
Hardware Hard Knocks
Motorola's modern era of wireless data begins with the acquisition of a company called Mobile Data International (MDI) of Vancouver, British Columbia. This feisty upstart challenged Motorola's venerable land mobile radio division on its home turf, producing armor-plated mobile data terminals typically bolted to the dashboards of police cars. Founded in 1978, MDI's crowning moment came when it won the contract to build a private mobile data system for Federal Express. Declaring that enough was enough, Motorola bought the company in 1988, installing it as the kernel of what became the Wireless Data Group. Assigning them ongoing responsibility for the Digital Communica
tions System (DCS), a private network Motorola developed for IBM, the folks in Vancouver that stayed after the acquisition became a wellspring for Motorola's mobile data products while those who left started several firms that formed the core of the Cellular Digita
l Packet Data (CDPD) effort. DCS went on to become ARDIS, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But, like every other company that has pursued wireless data, it's been a history marked with soaring hopes and unfulfilled expectations. Much of this can be attributed to the unwillingness of the major vendors to slog it out in the traditional slow-growth vertical markets--dispatch, field service, public safety and transportation. Lusting instead for the exponential growth associated with laptop and notebook computers, the entire industry has been on a fruitless quest for the killer app. While every attempt to break into the broad horizontal market has ended in heartbreak, including this author's failed efforts to lead the wireless e-mail charge wh
ile at Ericsson back in the early '90s, the logic behind this crusade is inescapable. Only exponential growth can justify the massive investments required to build and operate nationwide wireless infrastructure. Even if successfully executed, a stick-to-the-knitting vertical strategy can only lead to the ultimate bankruptcy of the network operator.
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