http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/071130/motorola.html?.v=11

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Motorola Inc's (NYSE:MOT - News) embattled chief executive, Ed Zander, will step down after a year of disappointing earnings and market share losses, raising investor hopes his successor will turn the business around.

Motorolla is/was one of America's best and biggest companies. But I've been using it as a poster boy of idiotic business practices for a couple years. When it started tanking this year I could only say 'not surprised'. Affirmative action, mba's, women managers, financial 'innovation', replaced the old school American engineering power.

One brilliant idea they had that actually saddened me was the company under white men had built up 10 billion dollars in cash. The new leadership decided to do share buybacks with that money. Buying high desperately trying to prop the price of the stock up, but now as the stock has declined maybe 40%... however much stock they bought up there has fallen 40%.

Whats scary is even in the face of massive share buybacks the stock keeps falling. If you look at its income statements you can see why. In addition while they are losing money selling cell phones, while their competitors are raking in the money.. they are also rapidly losing market share. Samsung passed them this year to become the number 2 cell phone maker in the world. How did Samsung do it? Tons of engineers and big time r&d.