Now that
another major lay-off wave is about to hit Motorola, it’s perhaps time to contemplate how the dominant company in a major industry sometimes misreads the most important consumer trends. This typically happens when a long and well-established trend suddenly reverses. People inside companies like
Motorola build their entire careers around one decade-long design goal — and when the wind shifts, the company culture is often impossible to change. The handset industry spent the years 1992-2002 in a race to cut the weight of mobile phones from about 500 grams to 80 grams. After that trend crested and reversed in 2002, miniaturization leaders like Motorola were simply never able to fully adjust. The power inside the company belonged to people who specialized in shaving off another millimeter from the phone thickness.
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