Marketing redirection
Robert Galvin became president of the company in
1956. Despite Motorola's ongoing success and strong
brand recognition in consumer products, he shifted the
company's strategy toward selling directly to business
and government. In 1962 Motorola began supplying radio
communications gear to the unmanned Mariner and later to
the manned Gemini space programs. Apollo astronaut Neil
Armstrong's 1969 message from the Moon was carried over
a Motorola-designed transponder.
In 1974 the company sold its Quasar television line
to Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co., Ltd., of Japan,
ending most of its historic consumer business. That same
year, Motorola released its first microprocessor for
sale to computer makers. Its most popular computer
chips, the MC680x0 series, were used in all of the early
Apple Macintosh computers and in workstation computers
built by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Silicon Graphics,
Inc., throughout the 1980s and early '90s. In 1993 the
company developed the first consumer RISC
(reduced-instruction-set computing) chip, the PowerPC,
with IBM Corporation and Apple Computer, Inc., in
an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Intel Corporation as
the leading seller of microprocessors.
Motorola was more successful in the market for
embedded microprocessors, which became ubiquitous in
automotive control units, industrial control systems,
and such common items as kitchen appliances, pagers,
video games, routers, laser printers, and handheld
personal computers. In this market Motorola became the
leading manufacturer.
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