Zander: Motorola passed on NAVTEQ buy

Say you're the CEO of Motorola -- a company that's fallen on hard times as of late, aiming for a rebound -- and you're looking to take a little dig at the world's largest cellphone manufacturer. Where do you begin? In this case, Nokia's purchase of NAVTEQ has fallen into your lap like a gift from the gods, giving you a chance to pan the "stunning" $8.1 billion sale price and casually drop the knowledge that Motorola had previously considered and passed on a bid. There's no telling where the fact ends and the fiction begins here, but at a recent talk to students of the University of Chicago's business school, Zander said that Motorola looked at scooping up NAVTEQ and concluded that it really didn't want to get into the applications biz for fear that it'd upset carriers -- a fear Nokia is challenging head on with both the acquisition and its Ovi initiative. Oh no you didn't, Ed! That's like Nokia dissing the iPhone's lack of 3G... oh, wait.