Obviously, I’m obsessing over this post about Motorola (see my Tumblr rss feed in the side bar as well as the previous post). But while the letter is prophetic, I have to comment on this:

In order to turn the handset division around, you need to bring in another Frost; someone worldly and dynamic who is more interested in Motorola’s success than their own corporate career. You need to task the company’s designers with the same mantra that created the RAZR — make me a phone that looks, feels, and works like a symbol of wealth and privilege. Recognize the superiority of American software, and bring back those jobs so irresponsibly outsourced to China and Russia.

Yeah, I’m OK with nice design but the idea of millions of American consumers running up their credit cards to have a symbol of wealth and privilege seems less than glorious. But the fact is that Nokia is now the world’s leader (or was at the end of last year; I haven’t been keeping up and these things seem to turn around on a dime) in handsets by a large margine in good measure because they sell cheap handsets to emerging markets around the world. So this isn’t the only path to growth.

Also, how often can this be repeated? People who thought their RAZR was hot and now think it is old are probably going to realize that they had over-valued it in the first place.  So part of the allure is probably not repeatable.