Never take your eye off the ball. Or the market. After a few hot years, the result of the enormous success of a line of cellular telephones called RAZR, Motorola has slipped badly simply because it forgot how fickle the cell phone buyer is. Interest in the RAZR is waning, and Motorola doesn't have a replace ready to market.

What the company needs now is time and money for a little old-fashioned R&D. Nokia and other competitors aren't going to wait while MOT struggles in the lab, so the pressure is on, time-wise. It is on money-wise as well because of the infamous greenmailer, Carl Icahn. He's promising a proxy fight to get a seat on Motorola's board, and the board is responding by speeding up a $11.5 billion stock buyback.

Analyst Len Leon of Standard and Poor's says that money would be better spent on product development. But, that would only increase the stock price in the long run. The buyback does it faster, and that's the Icahn formula -- scare, sell and move on.