Engadget has posted an open letter from former Motorala advisor Numair Faraz to CEO Greg Brown.
Regarding Ed Zander, former Motorola CEO, and Geoffrey Frost, Motorola Chief Marketing Officer, who was responsible for the original RAZR:
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.
MacDailyNews Take: Boy, Jobs sure played that moron Zander by having Motorola screw around with that piece of crap while Apple was concurrently developing a secret little project called “iPhone.”
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 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. I took his untimely death in 2005 very hard, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.
Full article — very highly recommended — here.
May 10, 2007: Motorola Chairman (until May) and then-CEO Ed Zander said his company was ready for competition from Apple’s iPhone, due out the following month. “How do you deal with that?” Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference Wednesday in Santa Clara, Calif. Zander quickly retorted, “How do they deal with us?” – IDG News Service
