Goodbye, Moto

Bloomberg published the following tidbit today about Motorola:

Motorola is improperly trying to prevent RIM (Blackberry) entities from hiring any Motorola employees, including the thousands of employees Motorola has already fired or will fire," Research In Motion said in a complaint.

Nice. Not only does Motorola make cellphones no one wants to buy, now they are preventing employees they are firing (because they making products no one wants to buy) from getting new jobs. In this economy. At Christmas. Epic fail.

Are the executive asshats at Motorola afraid these fired employees will give away secrets regarding the $2000 Aura cellphone which has a circular screen, 62-carat sapphire crystal lens, and 200-part rotating mechanism? Sounds like a big seller doesn't it?

A week ago, by the way, Motorola announced that for its remaining employees it would "permanently freeze pension plans, temporarily stop matching employees' 401(k) contributions, and not offer salary increases in 2009."

If you had invested $10,000 in Motorola stock 5 years ago you would have $2,900 today. If you had invested $10,000 in Research In Motion 5 years ago, you would have $45,000 today, or roughly 15 times as much.

So Motorola has accomplished the unique trifecta of dumping on its former employees, its current employees, and its shareholders. Motorola's corporate slogan is "Intelligence Everywhere." Everywhere except its executive suite.

Meanwhile thousands of developers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars developing applications for the iPhone, a device which people actually want to buy. A little iPhone app that does nothing but make fart noises is making its developers over $11,000 per day.

But the real smell is emanating from the executive offices at Motorola. Goodbye, Moto!

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Comments

[TheVicar]

Motorola has been making bad decisions for a looooooooong time. Just one example: back in the 1990s, Motorola had a highly profitable processor division, making the 680x0 family (used in pre-1994 Macs and lots of embedded devices) and most of the early PowerPC chips. (This division has since been spun off as Freescale Semiconductor.) Most actual computer makers used no Motorola chips, or used them in optional components, but there was a company which was using Motorola chips exclusively: Apple. Motorola had mixed Macs and PCs in use throughout the company. They decided to standardize their internal machines -- on Windows. So not only did they ditch the only company using their CPUs, they made huge purchases which involved competitors' products.

(They then proceeded to fail utterly at making any substantial improvements to the PowerPC architecture for several years, until Apple finally had to abandon them as a supplier.)

So "stupid" isn't exactly a new direction for them. More of a tradition, actually.

[Luvial]

I thought non-compete agreements were non-enforceable?

[MyFatCat]

If you sign a non-compete agreement, and your employer loses the competition, can the employer still execute the non-compete terms--assuming that these terms do not improperly restrict the ability of labor to move?

I would think not. The problem I see is that Motorola will succeed at inhibiting job opportunities, because most HR screeners do not want to hire people who they might have to let go of later.

I'm wondering if Motorola's lost enough employees for a class action suit.