Motorola

"When I joined Sylvania in 1955, there were already twenty or thirty companies engaged in the semiconductor industry, which could roughly be grouped into two categories. The first category was large companies already in the electronics industry or closely related to it. At that time the largest electronics businesses were radios and televisions, but the computer industry was about to emerge. Companies in this category included GE, RCA (Radio Corporation of America), IBM, Motorola, Sylvania, Sperry, and so on."

"When he sold assets, he almost always sold for stock (the reason that, to this day, Liberty has large holdings of News Corp., Time Warner, Sprint, and Motorola stock) or sheltered gains through accumulated NOLs, and he made constant use of the latest tax strategies. As Dennis Leibowitz said, “TCI hardly ever disposed of an asset unless there was a tax angle to it.”10 No other cable company devoted remotely as much time and attention to this area as TCI."

"Currently, BYD owns two major industry groups: IT and automobiles. Its main customers are top-tier international communication industry clients such as Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung. As a global leader in secondary rechargeable battery manufacturing, BYD's IT and electronic components industry has covered all core components and assembly business of mobile phones, with market shares of nickel batteries, lithium batteries for mobile phones, and mobile phone keypads leading globally."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"For example, the McDonald's people found out that the quality of the fries depended significantly on the starch content of the potatoes used, which had to be 21 percent. Ray Kroc sent specialists to the potato suppliers, who measured the starch content of the potatoes with a strange device - a hydrometer. The sight of the McDonald's specialists with their hydrometers left many a potato farmer speechless. They had never experienced someone showing up to subject their potatoes to thorough testing. But Kroc was still not satisfied. He inquired about how the potatoes were stored, and was shocked to hear that most suppliers stored the tubers in artificial caves lined with peat. So he began to look for processing companies that were willing to invest in modern storage with automatic temperature control. But that wasn't enough. With scientific precision, he had the frying process in the restaurants analyzed and potential improvements worked out. The husband of Kroc's secretary, who had previously worked as an electrical engineer for Motorola and then opened a McDonald’s restaurant with his wife, studied the frying process for the fries for several months in the basement of his restaurant. Eventually, he came to the belief that McDonald’s needed its own research lab, because despite all the improvements, the quality of the fries varied – and Kroc would not tolerate this. Kroc eventually agreed to the proposal to set up a small laboratory."

"By late 1999, with GI trading above $80, Motorola bought the company for $11 billion. Thanks to our stock and warrants, TCI briefly became a controlling shareholder in Motorola, with a stake worth nearly $5 billion. GI’s ownership would shift again, but for a moment, I held the reins of the company I’d once dreamed of working for. What would Monty say now?"

"In June that year, on the day the iPhone was released in the US, Steve came over with Jonathon Ive, Senior Vice President of Design, during dinner time. I thought it was strange because there was no reservation, but he came specially to show us the iPhone. Standing near the counter, around “5” and “6,” he held an impromptu briefing session with us and the employees. I probably first saw a mobile phone when I was running a sushi place on University Avenue in Palo Alto, so it must have been in the late 1980s. A regular Japanese customer proudly showed off a Motorola product about the size of a lunch box at the counter. On the other hand, the first iPhone I held was very small, yet the screen was large and beautiful. Unfortunately, I don’t clearly remember the details of the explanation, but I remember the young employees being very excited."