Motorola has enough patents and secondary business to survive - thats where Palm got burnt. Apple didn't have to pay Palm royalties on anything (before the heyday of Palm there was the Newton) and HP
There are a few ICT companies that you should never write off. On my list: Nokia, Microsoft, Novell, Apple, IBM, HP, Motorola, Sony, Erickson, Dell, Oracle and Intel. All of these companies have appeared unstoppable in some or another field at some time and appeared dead in the water at other times either as a whole or with regard to their "core" products. These companies buy out and are occassionally bought out (but if they are bought out or merged some how an essential element of the original company stays). What makes these companies dominate is that they have the ability to both roll out products that are game changers (or at least appear to be) while having enough conservativeness to weather their market being destroyed from under them. Apple was big stuff then she fell off the band wagon, licked her wounds matured much of the stuff she was working on packaged it and hit the market with a run. Novell was high and mighty in workgroup networking - in the world of DOS Microsoft had PCDOS to compete with, both were supported on Novell - Microsoft changed the game with Windows 95. We still have Novell 15 years later and what is more they made a big play on the Suse front.
What these companies also do is play with each other. They co-operate, fall out, litigate and have every other possible relationship move playing out between each other. For one thing they have (or at least have access to) deep pockets and invariably have technology that the other players want. They hedge bets change direction and become each other. I have included Erikson as apart from Sony because they work with Nokia on infrastructure business and I strongly suspect that we will see Erikson coming back as a seperate entity for future niche products that Sony don't want to include on their range - LTE "modems" for example.
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