Taking Down Iridium
from the you-won't-have-iridium-to-kick-around-any-more dept
The ultimate story in failures, Iridium, has finally decided that are no real potential buyers for the system, and are finalizing plans to destroy the satellites. I still think Iridium is a wonderful case study in what not to do in building a business. From the very beginning everyone explained why it would never work, but that never stopped them from spending their billions.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Taking Down Iridium
One aspect that no one has commented on publicly is that Motorola provided handsets with a very slim, comparatively small "form factor" until fairly late in 1997. When they finally gave LLC the models for the near-production model, the slim size and pencil-thin antenna had been replaced by a thick body and cigar-sized antenna. Iridium was sandbagged by this Motorola oh-by-the-way, and given Kyocera's software problems with their cool-silver, smaller handset, had no plan-B strategy available.
Don
[ link to this | view in chronology ]