10 reasons why Motorola failed

5. Motorola should have moved into content. This one might be true. Motorola led in set top boxes and IPTV. It should have jumped all over Tivo/Slingshot. It made a great acquisition with Symbol --and it understood content, but didn't carry the day.

6. Motorola stopped innovating. True. Do you carry a BlackBerry? A smartphone? Should Motorola have been a platform company, like Google is moving to? The Razr was the precursor to both the iPhone and the BlackBerry. By being late, it surrendered the high ground. It should have jumped on Palm. Plus, no one on the Motorola's senior management team ever sold a product to a consumer. It really doesn't sell licenses; it sells phones to teenage girls on Facebook.

7. Motorola didn't execute. Exactly so. Its customers -- the wireless carriers -- had a hate-hate relationship with Motorola, which did not deliver what it promised it would. Motorola never drank its own Kool-Aid; they never built the "seamless mobility" lifestyle among its various product groups. Can you see a way that consumers could have wanted to tie in their needs at home, at work, on their person and their auto? Sure you can. But Motorola could never bring these warring tribes together inside the firm. Face it -- it communicated mainly by rumor.

8. Motorola didn't grow. In the past, unhappy stockholders would just sell their stock. Today, they moan and scream and force stupid actions. Motorola now has to go through gyrations which will make it easier for its competitors. Right now, no one wants to buy this division so it will be spun off to the stockholders. This looks like a very tough business to run. Turning a company with a downward spiral is the single hardest job in technology.

9. Motorola is a loose confederation of warring tribes. Of course it is. It is a company of 66,000 employees. But the warring tribes never coalesced. This was the problem that Zander tried to fix. Too little, too late. Game over.

10. Motorola never had the sense of urgency. Could be true. Everyone else moves at warp speed; Motorola jogged at its own pace, more like a monopolist than a paranoid competitor.

One of the benefits of capitalism is that it kills off those that are slow to innovate, slow to execute. But I feel somehow badly that the firm that invented cellular is now the walking wounded.