Original post. I know I once wrote a column that said "Buh-Bye, Moto," but I didn't mean it.

Yet now here we have Greg Brown, Motorola's new CEO, releasing a bizarre statement where he says he's exploring selling off the half of the company that makes consumer mobile handsets. In our news story, Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson tries to play that down, saying it's business as usual. But if so, why even mention the option?

I have two theories.

Theory #1: I do not understand the stock market. I have no individual stock investments, and the market makes no sense to me. This insanity is designed to have some sort of positive effect on Motorola's stock price. If you look closely at Brown's and Erickson's quotes, they try to drive you in that direction - it's like a petulant teenager declaiming loudly that she'll run away because her parents (in this metaphor, the stock market) don't love her enough.

Theory #2, the more insidious one: CEO Greg Brown comes from the enterprise/networks side of the business. Over the past two years, Motorola massively improved its position in the big-business world by buying Good and Symbol, an acquisition Brown was highly involved in. These things are facts. My speculation is that Brown, coming from that world, sees it now as Motorola's core business, and sees consumer handsets as some sort of fever dream from the minds of former CEO Ed Zander and former CTO Padmasree Warrior. (Erickson disagreed, of course, but what do you expect her to say?)

In any case, Motorola departing the consumer handset business would be an utter disaster for US consumers. Motorola is US based, it's #1 in the US, and it takes the US market seriously, often releasing devices here before they do elsewhere. For Nokia and Sony Ericsson, our market is an irrelevant sideshow. We're more important to Samsung and LG, but they often save their top technologies for Korea and Europe. If a foreign firm buys up Motorola's handset unit, you can be sure that they won't feel the same connection to the US market that Motorola has built over the past sixty years - and that Americans' phone choices will decrease.