Last month we were contacted by the late Geoffrey Frost's personal adviser at Motorola; until Frost's death in 2005, Numair Faraz worked under the Motorola's former CMO -- the man widely regarded as the father of the RAZR. Like many (ourselves included), over the years Numair has become increasingly disenfranchised with the company's direction -- enough so that he compelled us to publish his letter to Motorola, its board of directors, and MOT investors everywhere regarding the company's egregious missteps and mismanagement.
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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 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. [That was certainly the buzz around the industry at the time. -Ed.] 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.

Meanwhile, Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey's work as the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR for years. Instead of channeling that money into the obvious -- further development of groundbreaking consumer devices -- Zander purchased enterprise companies such as Symbol ($3.9b), and engineered billions of dollars in stock buy... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]