Motorola came into being from an earlier company. Paul Galvin founded Galvin Manufacturing in 1928 in Chicago. The company began producing car radio receivers in 1929, and Galvin also explored whether he could produce a mobile radio for the police. He met Daniel Noble, a professor working on mobile design, and brought him into the company. The company was renamed Motorola in 1947 after the car radios it produced, and it was in that same year that Noble established an Arizona research laboratory for the pursuit of defense contracts for radio communications. At the time, radios required vacuum tubes, and the company purchased these from RCA. Noble persuaded Galvin to invest in research and development toward the production of solid-state components, and in the late 1950s the company also began producing semiconductors. Motorola has since produced integrated circuits and microprocessors. These products enabled the company to market outside the company's strong niche in the automobile industry.
In 1959 Galvin died and was replaced by his son, Robert. In the 1970s the company changed focus and sold its television business to the Japanese company Matsushita. Motorola then invested in the data communications market for hardware such as modems. The company acquired Codex (1977) and Universal Data Systems (1978). Motorola then invested heavily in data communications. In 1990 the company announced a settlement in an ongoing patent dispute with Hitachi over the 68030 computer chip. Galvin was succeeded in 1990 by George Fisher. The company today emphasizes international operations and announced plans for a $120 million plant in China as well as a new software engineering lab in India.
The Porter Model analyzes a company according to the technological dimension of its competitive strategy. The Motorola Company has been a company based on technological innovation since it started as a company producing car radio receivers. ...