Content area
Full Text
Market pioneer Iridium was a brilliant idea surrounded by multiple mistakes.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. "-George Barnard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutions.
THE PROBLEM WITH wildly creative ideas is they stand a better than even chance of turning out to be wildly creative failures. Well-intentioned projects become saddled with wildly inflated expenses, wildly underestimated problems, and wildly off-base timetables. In retrospect, such appears to have been the case with Iridium, the $5-billion global satellite-based wireless telephone system conceived and chiefly sponsored by Motorola.
Iridium emerged out of a well-- ingrained Motorola culture whose members took great pride in being able to find technological solutions to problems others said could not be solved. It was in this environment that Motorola engineers 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 system would provide consumers with a single wireless telephony standard and a single telecommunications system that would allow them to place and receive calls 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 consumers would no longer have to worry when traveling whether their telephones were analog or digital, based on code division, time division, or GSM technology, or could interface with foreign service providers. This 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 if they wished to truly appreciate the potential benefits of the age of wireless communications. More importantly to Motorola, this lack of a universal standard-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)-suggested a substantial opportunity in the wireless telephony market still existed.
The technical complexity of the Iridium system should not be underplayed-indeed the launching and positioning of 66...