Long time no blog. I know, I’ve been a bad boy. Last month I attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the largest gathering of mobile execs (and wanna-bes) outside of next week’s CTIA. I have lots of memories of the week, from the 2-hour registration queue to the stunning Gaudi architecture to $600/night for a second-rate hotel (damn you, Federal Reserve for that exchange rate). But the most poignant moment of the event was standing in the middle of Hall 8 between the Nokia and Motorola booths. Nokia was busting at the seams with people, having just launched 4 new GPS-enabled devices: the N96, N78, 6210 Navigator and 6220 Classic. Not to mention Nokia Maps 2.0. I glanced to my left and the Motorola booth was nearly empty, a sad sight for me as an ex-Motorolan. I wandered over there and asked one of the Moto employees if they had any GPS phones, “you know, like the ones over at the Nokia booth that you can geo-tag photos with.” She made no effort to put any spin on the fact they they had absolutely no devices in that category. So I’m not entirely shocked that the company just spun out the handset division, prepping for a possible sale. But some of the recent dirty laundry is still eye-opening (Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon). As a friend recently remarked, Motorola and Ed Zander will likely soon be immortalized in an HBS case study…
