Zander unveiled the Razr in the fall of 2004. That quarter, Motorola shipped 750,000 of them—a fraction of the 29 million handsets the company shipped in that same period. For all of 2005, Motorola planned to make only 2 million Razrs. But Ron Garriques, Zander’s new head of the cell-phone division, pushed for 20 million. That proved to be the key decision. The company shipped a total of 146 million phones for the year, up 40 percent from 2004, with much of the growth coming from the Razr. For all of 2005, Motorola’s revenue grew 18 percent to $37 billion. It had net income of $4.6 billion, three times the previous year’s total.

Galvin got the Razr started, but it took a salesman like Zander to make it huge. Yet the way he managed its success would help undo Motorola’s resurgence in an astoundingly short period of time.

The Razr’s outsize triumph masked what was not happening otherwise in the cell-phone division under Garriques. The Galvin culture was half dismantled, but Zander’s culture was not yet in place. Motorola engineers and designers were getting the message not to do anything the old way, but they weren’t sure of the new direction. In that atmosphere, little was done to follow the Razr with a new and better creation. And when Zander spun off the semiconductor division into a company called Freescale, Moto­rola agreed to use Freescale’s chips in its phones exclusively for two years—a disastrous move, since the chips lagged behind those made by other suppliers. Zander cut a deal with Apple to put iTunes on a Motorola phone—an iPhone before the iPhone existed—but the model never caught on. Nor did Motorola ever update its core software platform, P2K. It’s still on the phones Motorola ships today. Outdated and difficult to work with, P2K has turned into a software morass that prevents Motorola from getting new designs to market quickly. In the meantime, Nokia has created a modern software platform for all its phones, allowing it to efficiently design and build new models. It’s a key reason Nokia keeps stealing market share from Motorola.

With competitors surging into 3G in 2005 and 2006, Garriques gambled by doubling down on the company’s bet on the 2G Razr. He decided to slash its price and go for volume and market share. At first, the strategy worked: Razrs saturated the market. Motorola has sold more than 100 million in total, making the Razr by far the most popular cell phone in history.

But it also destroyed the brand. Once considered the premium phone, the Razr became the cheap handset you’d get for free when signing a contract. “The volumes were great, but the profits weren’t,” one top executive at a carrier told me. “They were making so many so fast, they ran into quality problems. We called them the Karmann Ghia of cell phones—sexy on the outside, but under the hood was a bunch of squirrels.”

Zander points out that while the media and investors focused on cell phones, he got rid of underperforming businesses, spun off Freescale, acquired more than 12 companies, and beefed up units that sell cable set-top boxes, government radio equipment, and wireless communication gadgets to such companies as FedEx. Those divisions have performed well recently. He also instituted the strategy of “seamless mobility,” which he believes helped unify and focus the company. (Galvin tells me he would never implement “strategy written as an advertising slogan.”)

Regardless of what Zander may have accomplished, by the end of 2006, he was in trouble. Lagging behind on 3G phones, Motorola had to cut prices even further on Razrs and still got stuck with outdated inventory. In January 2007, Zander had to announce dismal results for the final quarter of 2006. “And then, at the end of the month, I got this phone call from Mr. Icahn, my friend,” Zander told me. “It was kind of surreal.” Icahn had bought a small stake in Motorola and started a campaign to drive Zander out.

By the second quarter of 2007, Motorola was hurting; the company had lost $28 million, versus a $1.4 billion net profit in the same quarter in 2006. The cell-phone division had tumbled to under 15 percent of market share.

On November 30, Motorola announced that Zander would be replaced by Greg Brown, who had been Zander’s president and chief operating officer. Icahn finally won a board seat (which he filled with his deputy Keith Meister) and pushed to split up Motorola, urging that it slice off the cell-phone division, which has been dragging down Motorola’s less exciting but more profitable businesses. As C.E.O., Brown is following Icahn’s instructions and preparing the split. In August, he hired Jha as co-C.E.O., with the intention that he would eventually be C.E.O. of the spun-off handset division.

During the summer, Motorola surprised analysts by announcing better-than-expected results. The businesses Zander cited as doing well, such as cable set-top boxes and units for FedEx drivers, posted single-digit growth. But the cell-phone division saw revenue drop 22 percent.