Motorola's Binary Code

Dividing into two separate firms is logical — if the company can fix its cell-phone business

Michael Lewis

Motorola's co-CEO Sanjay Jha

Greg Brown, Co-CEO of Motorola, likes to compare his company's recent performance to the Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities. Yes, that's got to be the most clichéd literary reference in Western history, but Brown is not a wordsmith. He runs a gadget company. And that's the problem: Motorola was once renowned for manufacturing ultra-chic mobile phones. Yet since 2006, that business has been in free fall, and the company's overall revenue has dropped by half. The recession didn't help much. Keeping the $22 billion firm afloat were its less glamorous but profitable units that sell two-way police radios, barcode...

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