As padmasree warrior tells it, Motorola's new strategy materialised out of thin air during a transatlantic flight in February. Ms Warrior, the firm's chief technology officer, was on her way to an industry conference in Cannes with her boss, Ed Zander, who had taken over the previous month and was due to give a presentation. His slides, they concluded, were "kind of content-free", says Ms Warrior candidly. They began discussing what Mr Zander ought to be saying about the future direction of the world's second-largest maker of mobile phones. This was more than just a matter of presentation: Mr Zander had just taken the helm of a sprawling company racked by internal strife and strategic paralysis, and everyone wanted to know what he planned to do. Would he spin off smaller divisions and concentrate, Nokia-like, on phones? Would he retreat from handsets and focus on network equipment, as Ericsson had done? Or would he try to capitalise, like Samsung, on the convergence between communications and entertainment?
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