King Arthur: Who are you who can summon fire without flint or tinder?
Tim: There are some who call me… Tim.
– Search for the Holy Grail
Motorola said Friday that Ed Zander will step down as chief executive on Jan. 1 after months under pressure for the sharp decline of the company’s once-hot cell-phone business.
Zander, 60, will be replaced by President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Brown, 47, as CEO.
Zander, who will stay on as chairman until the company’s annual shareholders meeting in May 2008, maintained that the decision to go was his alone despite the severe criticism he received for the company’s struggles over the past year and calls from some shareholders to replace him.
“This is what I wanted to do,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. The cell-phone unit, Motorola’s biggest, saw quarterly sales plunge 36 percent to $4.5 billion and recorded an operating loss of $138 million. That was nearly $1 billion worse than a year ago but only about half the $264 million loss of the second quarter.
“You’d like to leave when you’re at the top of your game. … You don’t like to leave when you have a year like this with mobile devices,” Zander said. “But I think we have enough structurally done with this company that when mobile devices does get back to its execution, we’re a stronger company than we were four years ago.”
Sprint forced Gary Forsee out last month. SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, sought to buy a stake in Sprint Nextel this month and install Nextel’s former chairman, Tim Donahue, as chief executive. Sprint didn’t bite. Meanwhile, Sprint pulled out of its partnership with Clearwire on Mobile WiMAX earlier this month.
Since both CEOs were heavily committed to Mobile WiMAX, some observers, like Fortune and Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews, believe it may be a referendum on Mobile WiMAX:
With Forsee out of Sprint and Zander out of Motorola, you have two major firms that were committed to WiMax looking for leaders who will come in and not continue doing precisely what lead to their predecessors being forced out. Which means WiMax will be on the chopping block.Motorola could write down its Clearwire investment and spin off its Expedience division bought from that company, while refocusing on 3G and 4G cell. Sprint could decide to deploy something entirely different in 2.5 GHz, even if that delayed network buildout, rather than investing billions in something that they’re now not clear they want to move on.
Sprint and Clearwire planned to interconnect their WiMax networks, sharing costs and offering services to about 100 million people by the end of 2008. Sprint would focus its efforts primarily on 185 million urban dwellers, including 75 percent of the people located in the 50 largest markets, while Clearwire would focus on areas covering approximately 115 million people. That’s virtually everyone.
Proponents of Mobile WiMAX say:
- Mobile WiMAX is here. Now.
- Sprint and Clearwire picked up their nationwide spectrum for a song.
- Sprint says the infrastructure costs are one tenth that of cellular.
- Faster 100 Mbps 802.16m, in a couple of years, will be compatible with today’s Mobile WiMAX.
- LTE technology won’t be available until 2010-2012 and will require new everything.
- Meanwhile Sprint and Clearwire could grab market share from AT&T and Verizon.
Mobile WiMAX, with OFDMA, has the ability to dynamically assign a subset of subcarriers to individual users while Scaleable-OFDMA can use a variety of bandwidths and carriers to get a signal through. The ruggedized, efficient and open architecture have many engineers confident they have a winner.
Incumbants and their supporters would like to declare Mobile WiMAX dead. It’s not dead yet.
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