About a year and a half after our disbandment, the marketing manager from the New Shoes team pulled me into his office.
By now, the iPod models that were supposed to be ours had hit the shelves. They were everywhere.
“Look at this.”
And he pointed to the spreadsheet on his screen.
At the bottom of the summary column was a number around $4 billion.
But we knew this would happen. We told you it was gonna happen. That single decision saved them, at the time, a few million bucks, maybe a few 10s of millions. It probably soothed the street and secured some bonus for jaw-flappers.
But it cost them the company.
Because by now, all of Agere was starting to tailspin, not just the mobile phone division. Revenue was down 10% in 2005 and another ten in 2006, but we were about to fall off the cliff. We were jettisoning people and projects. The death spiral. By the end of 2007, LSI, a company from the servant class compared to our nobility status, had bought us.
Agere was no more.
It didn’t have to be this way. Twenty guys — twenty focused and excited pirates — had the power to change it all. Twenty guys would have doubled the entire company’s revenue with a single project.
And that was just iPod. We later learned that Apple also wanted to commit to us the first generation of, well…
“widescreen iPod with touch controls…revolutionary mobile phone…breakthrough internet communicator…“
For God’s sake, just stay on the train. Ignore the ex-girlfriend. You know she’s no good for you. Stop looking back. Start looking ahead. Not what wasn’t, but what can be.
They would have been heroes, not just inside Agere but in the entire semiconductor industry.
By the mid-2010s, in a particularly cruel twist of fate, the entrails of the former Agere Systems (by now already moved on from LSI to a company called Avago) would merge with and be consumed by Apple’s iPod rebound girl — Broadcom.
Not just death, but death with an aggrieved, “It didn’t have to be this way.”
