A Telephone for the World

This is an ambitious book that connects technology, capitalism, and globalization. It is all that more audacious because it uses a failed communications platform and business model to make these connections. Martin Collins tells the story of Iridium, a venture by Motorola, Inc., to provide a telephone service accessible from any point on the globe. Announced in 1990 and opened for service in 1998, Iridium required a constellation of sixty-six satellites (initially seventy-seven) and an expensive and technologically sophisticated handset. As Collins shows, the success of this venture also depended on Motorola harnessing and actively shaping a cluster of cultural expectations and hopes about connectivity and globalization. Motorola was well positioned to do this—it was a globe-spanning and future-oriented company that actively worked to blend its internal corporate culture with the local national cultures in which it did business. Ultimately, however, Iridium failed for two related reasons: lack of demand and unfortunate timing. Its backers within Motorola envisioned Iridium's customers to be well-heeled, globe-trotting businesspeople who demanded global connectivity. Internal marketing studies claimed that there were 42 million potential subscribers around the globe and that the venture could break even with only five hundred thousand. From the standpoint of the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the commercialization of the Internet, these optimistic projections had some validity. However, by the time the service began commercial operation at the end of 1998, most (if not all) business travelers already had this kind of connectivity, either through terrestrial cellular telephones or via e-mail over the Internet. By this time, it was hard to convince the business traveler to buy a $3,000 handset that weighed over one pound and to pay $3 to $7 per minute of air time. And the market for potential users in remote regions without access to terrestrial telephone networks or the Internet was small (until the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003

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