Engadget has posted an incredible letter written by Numair Faraz, the man who created and made the RAZR so incredibly popular a few years back. The title of the article is “Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon” and is a must read:
“Dear Greg Brown, and the rest of the executive team at Motorola,
As you may or may not recall, I worked with Geoffrey Frost as a personal adviser during his days as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of the company. I was the one quoted in Forbes in 2003 as saying “Motorola’s biggest problem is that Samsung kicks ass,” and eventually came to spend nearly three years working with Geoffrey during his efforts to revamp the company’s mobile lineup, which eventually saw the launch 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, while Geoffrey was tied up every which way in ROKR development, meetings, criscrossing travel, and so on, through his associates I implored the company to beef up their software expertise, and focus on creating socially networked devices (this was in the years before MySpace and Facebook became the juggernauts they are today). Your predecessor, Ed Zander, had little interest in this, and instead insisted on parlaying his relationship with Steve Jobs into the ill-fated ROKR effort in order to prop up Motorola’s stock price.
Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America’s greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I’ve always considered it Motorola’s dirty little secret that the strategy…”
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