I've always considered it Motorola's dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company's CMO—not the rest of the company's executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been. Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands.

From: Numair Faraz Date: February 5, 2008 7:27:58 PM EST To: Nick Denton Subject: Open letter to Greg Brown

Hi Nick,

Was wondering if you could have your guys publish this on Gizmodo. Would really appreciate it, and I am sure it would get a couple hits.

-numair

==

Dear Greg,

After making repeated attempts to contact you via your office, I am forced to write this open letter to publicly air my grievances concerning Motorola.

As you may or may not recall, I was the young person who worked with Geoffrey Frost during his days as CMO of the company. I was the one quoted in Forbes in 2003 as saying "Motorola's biggest problem is that Samsung kicks ass," and helped Geoffrey in his efforts to revamp the company's mobile lineup — an effort that eventually lead to the creation of the RAZR. As I told the company's senior designers at Motorola's 75th anniversary meeting: create something cooler and more expensive than anything else out there, and everyone will want it.

After the success of the RAZR, I implored the company to beef up their software expertise, and focus on creating socially networked devices (this, in the era before MySpace and Facebook became the juggernauts they are today). Your predecessor, Ed Zander, had little interest in this, and instead proceeded to prop up Motorola's stock price by parlaying his friendship with Steve Jobs into the ill-fated ROKR effort. Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest corporations, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I've always considered it Motorola's dirty little secret that their entire profit machine and strategy was run by their CMO — not the rest of the company's executives, who are as inept as they have ever been.

Many believe Ed Zander worked Geoffrey to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands. I took his untimely death in 2005 very badly, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey's work, and the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR. Instead of channelling that money into the obvious — you know, further development of consumer devices — Zander purchased enterprise companies such as Symbol, and engineered massive stock repurchases.

As I told Zander in a phone call in 2007, I felt that he was setting the company up for massive failure. He had the audacity to say "well, maybe Geoffrey should have come up with a better successor to the RAZR," and told me to "wait for big things in 2008." I guess he was right — he got a big golden parachute, and exited out of the company. Your appointment to the position of chief executive gave me cause for hope, and I reached out to you; I knew you were one of the main drivers behind the enterprise acquisitions, and that you had zero expertise in consumer devices. Surely you could use some help in turning that business around?

It really angers me to see that you're really no different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola — but instead of merely being incompetent, you killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer business doesn't give you a valid reason for selling the business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence. You have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mould Motorola into the market leader it can and should be; taking control of the handset division, as you have recently done, will accomplish very little — it will simply give you an ability to say "we tried our best" when you finally cart the business off to the highest bidder.

In order to turn the handset division around, you need to bring in another Geoffrey; someone worldly and dynamic who is more interested in success than their corporate career. You need to task the company's designers with the same mantra that created the RAZR — make me a phone that looks, feels, and works like a symbol of wealth and privilege. Recognize the superiority of American software, and bring back those jobs so irresponsibly outsourced to China and Russia. Fully embrace embedded Linux and Google's Android initiative, and take the phone operating system out of the stone age. Recognize that, while rich people don't really know what they want, the lower end of the market does — and fund the development of an online "crowdsourced" device design platform to take advantage of this fact. Get rid of all of your silly, useless marketing, including those overpriced and completely ineffective celebrity endorsements, and do one solidified global campaign with Daft Punk (the only group whose global appeal extends from American hip hoppers to trendy Shanghai club kids to middle-aged Londoners). Understand that the next big feature in handsets isn't a camera or a music player — it is social connectedness; build expertise in this area, and sell it down the entire value chain.

I've been there when Motorola's handset division was brought back from the brink of death 5 years ago; follow my advice, and we can do it again.

Maybe it sounds like I take the downfall of Motorola personally; I do. It was my experience at Motorola, with people like Geoffrey and all of the loyal employees who still remain, that taught me that Corporate America can and should be; now, with people such as Zander and yourself, Motorola symbolizes the worst of Corporate America. As an immigrant, and someone who has traveled all over the world, I really do appreciate the uniqueness and importance of the American culture of creativity and ingenuity; whereas other countries back their money on gold and commodities, we back ours on our ability to invent the future. As an American, I believe that the protection of this culture is more important than anything else — as such, I feel it necessary to publicly shame you and your incompetent executive team. The failure of Motorola as an American institution of creativity and innovation, should you let it happen, will be entirely of your doing. Hopefully you'll keep that in mind while relaxing with your golden parachute.

Regards,

Numair Faraz
numair@numair.com

Plus, it seems like Motorola's more expensive models aren't selling well, and people are happy getting a super-cheap RAZR (or RAZR variant) inside cereal boxes and stuck to the bottom of their shoes. But all this missing of analysts' forecasts four quarters in a row makes things pretty dour for CEO Ed Zander, who just may be replaced for a newer model soon. [MacWorld]

It's early, but Apple is certainly off to a strong start. As we mentioned earlier, Bloomberg reported that 500,000 to 700,000 iPhones were estimated sold over the weekend, at $500 to $600 apiece. Motorola by contrast took much longer—the final three months of 2004—to sell 750,000 RAZRs. The GSM RAZR sold by Cingular, you'll recall, cost $500 at launch.

Forecasts for 2005 RAZR sales were initially conservative, but a sudden desire to get aggressive sparked the move to push RAZR hard: Instead of building 2 million in 2005, it would build 20 million. The trajectory was set, the marketing masterwork was staged. RAZR sold 5 million units in the second quarter of 2005, 12 million in the third quarter, and by July 2006, two years after its unveiling, 50 million had been sold.

Jobs has set much lower goals for the iPhone: He wants to sell 10 million in 18 months. While this may represent the fine art of underpromising and overdelivering, there are good reasons for aiming significantly lower than Motorola.

• For one thing, the iPhone is exclusive to one carrier (AT&T) and one technology (GSM), whereas the RAZR was eventually sold by every carrier on both GSM and CDMA networks. Without Sprint and Verizon Wireless, the iPhone reaches less than half of its potential US customers.

• Motorola's sales were worldwide, while the iPhone is currently only sold in the US. Although there is buzz that Vodafone is vying to carry the iPhone throughout Europe, no plans have been announced.

• In addition, iPhone falls into the "smartphone" category in many people's opinion, and the market for smartphones is significantly smaller than the market for, well, dumb phones. Besides, corporations dominate the smartphone business, and the iPhone is not even sold through AT&T's business division.

Iconic branding and aggressive sales speculation aside, there is a strange kinship between Apple's objet du moment and Moto's has-been superstar. It was Jobs who inspired Ed Zander when he planned a full-fanfare keynote RAZR unveiling in Chicago in July 2004. We all know the story of the subsequent, ill-fated partnership between Jobs and Zander—iTunes ROKR RIP—but even after that divorce, the eerie links continue.

Just compare the two phones. The RAZR changed the position of side keys and leveled the traditionally exposed keypad, to some criticism; the iPhone eliminated the keypad all together, to similar skepticism. Motorola chose glass for its exposed RAZR screen and strong anodized aluminum for the body; the iPhone designers made similar choices for style and durability. In a radical move, Motorola engineers put the phone's antenna on the bottom, below the mouthpiece. Where's the iPhone antenna? Yep, same spot.

Additional Sources:
RAZR'S Edge [Fortune]
Apple's music biz, iPod share grows [MacNN]
Motorola Ships 50 Millionth MOTORAZR [Geekzone]

10:55 - Ed Zander: "RAZR is not just a product, it's a brand, a brand we'll continue to market for years to come. Over 98 million RAZRs sold. This quarter, 100 million RAZRs worldwide. I believe it's the fastest selling consumer device ever. Five new colors for GSM markets. But..."

RAZR 2 - Super thin, super strong, RAZR 2: Worlds ultimate feature, style fashion phone - larger 2-inch display on outside. Twice the brightness and 10X resolution. Vacuumized metal front. Stainless steel and cast aluminum housing support. More scratch resistant cast aluminum. One-piece molding means less chance of breakpoints.

Features: 3G HSDPA, EVDO, or EDGE/GPRS. 500MHz ARM 11 processor. Race through menu to get apps you want. Rich graphics. Linux/Java phone - available on some versions of the RAZR 2. Complete UI redesign.

Crystal Talk noise-reduction technology. Talking phone. MP3 player with Windows Media capability. Highspeed USB 2.0. Stereo Bluetooth compatible with ROKR S9 headphones and front touchscreen. Google Maps application in cluded. Movies can be viewed portrait or landscape, multishot mode in still camera, "see what I see" video conferencing with live streaming footage. "Really simple," says Zander. Available in all technologies this summer.

10:45 - The new Moto Z8: this is the phone we saw Ed Zander using, which he calls the "media monster," a camera phone with cool bent slider action. "When form meets function this well, convergence becomes a reality. People want form to define function." Z8, 3.4Mbps. 2MP camera, video at 30 fps; first high-res screen with 16 million colors. HSDPA. Up to 4GB MicroSD card (10 movies); partnership with Universal Pictures; Bourne Identity preloaded; also working with Sony and Warner. Program it to download TV shows from DVR. SSX snowboarding will be preloaded at summer launch. Send photos to Flickr, MySpace or YouTube with just one click. "Complete out of the box multimedia experience; more capable than an iPod," says Jeremy Dale. Ships across Europe in June.

10:40 ROKR Z6: First true Linux Java product; solid feel "like Mercedes car door," says Jeremy Dale; music sync, music management, music enjoyment. Transfer speeds: download in less than 3 seconds. Storage capacity: external slot for 2GB cards (1,000 songs). Windows Media Player, album art, playlists. Simple "drag and drop" process. ROKR Modality: shut, it's an MP3 player with only keys for music; open it's a phone. Stereo audio, and stereo Bluetooth, with new pair of sweet red Bluetooth headphones (S9, to be included in-box in Europe).

10:25 Q8 and Q9 Introduction: Jeremy Dale - "At Motorola, we want devices to work for us rather than against us; single device, cell phone will be that device...Today we're announcing worldwide availability of Q8 and HSDPA-version of Q9. It redefines what a smartphone should be, Europe and other regions this summer. 3.6 Megabits per second, twice as fast as nearest competitor. Q9 is the fastest smartphone in the world today, and critically, where currency of the realm is time, speed matters."

Q9 details: New ergonomic design; seven dedicated keys, adaptive display for sunshine and indoor situations, using dual light sensors not found on any other product in this space. Only 2MP camera smartphone; Windows Mobile 6; 325MHz processor that can handle three activities simultaneously; stereo speakers. "Beautiful slim design."

10:21 - What's after RAZR? Jim Wicks, corporate VP of design: "Motorola invented thin, and will continue to do thin. We do it right, without compromise. Going forward, introducing a layering effect on top of thin, through Linux Java, touch; more digital than mechanics. Modality: when in music mode, it transforms itself to look like a music player; when a camera, it will look like a camera. Going forward, the focus will be less about one particular product, more about a suite of products that define the brand. Going forward, best of hardware will be married to the best experience. The resulting behavior is what becomes iconic. In doing this, we're able to launch a suite of products with immediate impact: not thin for thin's sake, not arbitrary form factor - it's a rich experience."

10:17 Here's Ed! Introducing peeps that are making it happen. He says "products", plural. New and exciting products. Plural. For sure.

10:15am - Movie pf people with Moto phones - including Will Ferrell and a bunch of much prettier people. Motorola all over the world. Moto on QVC. Kanye and Moto. RED Moto (with Charlie Sheen?) Lots of drums. Moto: Big in Japan.

10:12am - Some crunchy new electric folk music is playing, and the slideshow on the big screens depicts a multiple choice quiz about Motorola's history and trivia. (Motorola executed the first VOIP cellular phone call in what year? What was the year the first Motorola insignia appeared? One of the world's most expensive handsets, the Motorola SLVR L7 Diamond mobile retails for? Answer: 193?, 2006, $75,000)

– Noah Robischon & Wilson Rothman

Contradicting Zander's statements earlier this week, a Verizon spokesperson claimed that there is going to be no launch event next week. Perhaps Zander was using the announcement to force Verizon's hand early, maybe as a result of the Q being delayed so many times.

Either way, the Q should be out fairly soon. They've even got a contest to win one.

Verizon Denies Motorola Q Launching Next Week [Brighthand]