Freesteel - the original adaptive clearing algorithm - and Motorola rant

It's lost in all the hype but worth recognising that the breakthrough in CNC machining that is called "adaptive clearing" was made by a couple of guys from Liverpool back in the early noughties. It's all been subsumed into firstly HSMworks and finally Autodesk (after they acquired HSMworks). 

Julian maintains a blog ("Freesteel") that incorporates some of the early material and it includes an interesting brochure from those days.

It's clear that his experience of being part of Autodesk was not a happy one. It has distinctly similar echos to my time at Motorola, where corporate bullshit, management bollocks and sheer incompetence was an evident prerequisite for advancement into senior management. At Motorola, we could look forward to a bullshit-packed CEO's email each month from Chris Galvin and his henchmen. I could almost say I miss these now, as they were so rich in vitamins.

One key benefit resulting from the acquisition of an exciting new player or competitor is the ability to stifle competition or unwelcome near innovation. This was demonstrated close to home when Motorola acquired TTPcom in Cambridge for £100M - then promptly sacked all the staff and closed down the business. An endless cycle of growth, retraction, redundancies, company sales etc to maintain the share price (and their bonuses presumably), finally left the company up its own arse. Motorola today is a tiny vestige of its former self (150k employees when I worked there in a wide range of sectors, 40k today, clearly struggling and solely in telecoms). It is a mere shadow of its former self.

Of course, Galvin considers himself above any form of responsibility for the demise of Motorola. In fact, in a Wikipedia entry clearly written either by himself or some worthless sycophant, he considers himself to have turned the company around and delivered a transformation. Mercans seem to be big into believing their own bullshit. The harder they struggle and the more they fuck up, the bigger the beast they are. Making a complete mess of something, then battling to contain the resulting shitstorm seemed to be a surefire recipe for recognition, whereas quietly making a success by careful competent execution was a thankless hiding to nowhere. Presumably there was some "constructive upside" to the acquisition and loss of TTPcom for £100M that only someone of Galvin's intellect could possibly comprehend, even if he did seem curiously unable to articulate it.

Of course, Motorola was started in 1928 by Galvin's grandfather, so it may be no great coincidence that his rise through the ranks was almost meteoric. And that possibly didn't help him to avoid delusions of grandeur. There's that "entitlement" or "ownership" problem again.

There is a Lancastrian expression "clogs to clogs is three generations". The first generation founds a business, the second generation grows it and the third generation plows it into the ground, being incapable of even pissing into a paper bag. There are many examples of this out there.

Thankfully, some parts of Motorola live on in other forms, eg the AIEG (automotive) division I was part of has been part of Continental for many years. That could only have been a significant improvement for all concerned.