Global 500 - Motorola Hears Beijing Calling - FORTUNE - Page
Global 500 - Motorola Hears Beijing Calling - FORTUNE - PageBeijing Calling
How a team of engineers in China persuaded Motorola to build a Linux-based mobile phone and take it global.
By Stephanie N. Mehta
A few years ago, back when people used their cellphones merely for talking, Motorola realized it had a problem. The No. 2 maker of mobile handsets wanted to sell more sophisticated phones that could send and receive e-mail, instant messages, and other data services. But Motorola’s homegrown operating system— the brains of every cellphone—wasn’t flexible enough to handle all the new applications the company wanted to load onto its gadgets. So in 2000, a group of engineers at the company’s research and development center in Beijing offered up a novel solution: Why not use Linux, the free operating system that was starting to develop a cult following in geek circles?
It was a crazy idea—at the time, no company had put Linux on a mobile phone—but Motorola decided to let the Beijing team run with it. China proved to be an ideal lab. The government saw Linux as a way of reducing the country’s dependence on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. And being far from Motorola’s Schaumburg, Ill., headquarters gave the Beijing engineers more leeway to experiment with non-mainstream technologies.
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