Before the start of the smartphone revolution (circa 2005) the "smartphones" of the time are what we'd call flip-phones now. They were smart in the sense that they could run apps (J2ME, blech), take pictures and such.

Moto had dozens of different models at any given point in time. All running various kinds of (what we'd call today) embedded operating systems, closer to what we'd class as a RTOS these days. Stuff like Symbian. Most / all of them were not that easy to do application development with. And none could really scale up in processing power (multi-core, which wasn't a thing back then), decent TCP/IP networking, and driving a large and complicated GUI.

In one sense, as a leader in the cell phone business, they should have been well placed to make a big splash with smartphones. But none of their software on that side of things was able to transition to that, which is why they adopted Android. To their credit, they did produce some decent Android phones, but because they relied on Google, they were now also competing severely with HTC, Samsung, LG and others.