Iridium Story

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caselNpoint THE IRIDIUM STORY: A MARKETING DISCONNECT? Market pioneer Iridium was a brilliant idea surrounded by multiple mistakes. By Eric M. Olson, Stanley F. Slater, and Andrew J. Czaplewski "The reasonable man adapts himself to th e world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. The refore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."—George Barnard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutions. THE PROBLEM WI TH wildly creative ideas is they stand a better than even chance of turning out to be wildly cre- ative failures. Well-intentioned projects become saddled with wildly inflated expenses, wildly underestimated prob- lems, and wildly off-base timetables. In retrospect, such appears to have been the case with Iridium, the $5-billion global satellite-based wireless telephone by Motorola. Iridium emerged out of a well- ingrained Motorola culture whose mem- bers took great pride in being able to fmd technological solutions to problems others said could not be solved. It was in this environment that Motorola engi- neers initially envisioned a go-anywhere telecommunications system that would eventually come to be comprised of 66 telecommunication satellites circling the planet at 17,000 miles an hour in low altitude orbits. This new and daring sys- tem would provide consumers with a single wireless telephony standard and a single telecommunications system that would allow them to place and receive cal ls in dense jungles, urban canyons, and as the television advertisements suggested, at the ends of the earth. The beauty of this system would be that con- sumers would no longer have to worry when traveling whether their telephones were analog or digital, based on code division, time division, or GS M technolo- gy, or could interface with foreign serv- ice providers. Tbis lack of a worldwide or even countrywide standard meant travelers might well be required to carry several different phones and subscribe to several different service providers i f they wished to truly appreciate the potential benefits of the age of wireless communications. More importantly to Motorola, this lack of a universal stan- dard—coupled with the fact there were still many places on the planet that didn't have, nor were likely in the near future to be able to justify the expense of setting up cellular or Personal Communication Systems (PCS)—sugge st - ed a substantial opportunity in the wire- less telephony market still existed. The technical complexity of the Iridium system should not be under- played—indeed the launching and posi- tioning of 66 satellites, the development of network switching systems, and tbe design and development of tbe actual telephone have been compared to a moon shot. However, the fact remains that the basic idea of satellite telephone transmission was well documented before Motorola ran with it. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated in the 19th century that telephone calls could be 5 4 I M M S u m m e r 2 0 0 0

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