“Why did Google spend $12.5 billion to purchase Motorola Mobility? It’s been nearly two years since the deal was announced and close to a full year since it closed, and the questions keep piling up while the answers keep getting worse. The biggest problem is that Motorola’s patent portfolio doesn’t appear to be worth anything close to what either company assumed: the judge in the Microsoft v. Motorola patent case ruled yesterday that Redmond owes a paltry $1.7 million in annual royalties for using Motorola’s standards-related Wi-Fi and video-encoding patents in every Xbox 360 and Windows 7 PC sold, rather than the $4 billion Motorola had originally demanded.”
I think it’s because of Motorola’s foray into combined laptop/phone hybrids. I suspect google will at some point use Motorola’s patents regarding lapdock and Atrix to bring out a new model phone/netbook combination. They probably haven’t released anything yet because they’ll retool it for chromebook, or make it more full-featured than Motorola’s offering.
Ridiculous.
I am pretty sure there are other products that already do this (ubuntu for android has had demos showing the same thing, rumor is RIM is also working on something similar). It’s not something extremely complicated to recreate and it’s CERTAINLY not worth 12.5 billion.
I think a better reason is to offer the promise for phones that run stock android and can be updated easily independently from the carrier. Right now only the Nexus can do this and they are difficult to get a hold of (specially abroad).
Samsung and others will be forced to compete with a company that updates phones faster and offers a longer lifetime to existing products, and the overall Android ecosystem will benefit. Also, this will likely help Google diversify into hardware too.
The point/problem however is that new devices haven’t come.
Google has owned Motorola Mobility for 11 months now. Where’s the Motorola Nexus phone?
Indeed, this is a Google owned company, and they haven’t made Android 4.2, a 5 month old OS, available on any of their devices yet. What’s going on there? Why are Google’s Android engineers not working closer with their Motorola colleagues to ensure these upgrades happened in a timely manner?
It’s almost as if Google bought them and then forgot they owned them.
It takes a lot of time to reorganize a company like that. And don’t forget that Motorola had other contracts going on that Google had to honor. We have yet to see the outcome of the merger, but it shouldn’t take too long now.
t’s still a really short time.
China has allowed companies to have shorter product cycles and a shorter time to market thanks to massive workforce of manual assembly lines, but for that you still need to design products, that takes a few years from concept to prototype, to focus groups, to hardware design, hardware production planning, etc.
Google is also pretty new at this since all they do is the OS, so my guess is that it will be a gradual process. The Google-influenced phones will be sort of an hybrid first, to later start adopting more innovative features in subsequent iterations.
Edited 2013-04-27 18:23 UTC
The next Google I/O holds the answer. If the rumored “Motorola X-phone” does show up, Google bought Motorola for the devices, if not, they spent 12.5 billion for a couple of FRAND patents.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; el-gr; LG-P990 Build/GRJ23) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 MMS/LG-Android-MMS-V1.0/1.2
Eric Schmidt has made a statement about how they inherited an X month pipeline of products (X is a number I don’t remember) they had to burn through.
It makes sense to have most of your engineers work on new products instead of updating the old ones.
The appearance of not of the Motorola X-phone in the next I/O will tell if the Moto purchase was a good investment.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; el-gr; LG-P990 Build/GRJ23) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 MMS/LG-Android-MMS-V1.0/1.2
Motorola is king of setupboxes.
EDIT: scratch that, they sold that part of the business for 2.5 billion.
Edited 2013-04-28 14:23 UTC
This reminds me of the Samsung-Apple trial, where people on OSNews were so sure that Apple would lose that they had a hard time coming to grips with reality.
In this case, it is clear now as its always been that the Motorola deal was a desperate move by a company frustrated that Microsoft turned Android into one of their billion dollar revenue streams.
When people dared mention that the Moto deal and its patents were worthless when it came to defense, they were voted down. You had the familiar mouth breathers rejoicing at the thought of the end of Microsofts “protection racket”. The actual result is quite amusing.
So Microsoft has gone ahead and started licensing ODMs in addition to OEMs for Android related patents, further strengthening their patent licensing program. Quite the opposite to what some claimed would happen.
We watched almost in real time as Google’s FRAND foolery was dismantled by courts and the DOJ. Everyone serious knew that Motorola’s $4bln demand would never stand. Except of course, the usual crowd of patent law experts at OSNews.
Reality is a stubborn thing.
There’s also how Google was possibly kinda blackmailed into buying Motorola (or at least to buy them at a higher price) – after all, in the weeks leading to the buyout announcement, Moto said it might go with patent suits after other Android vendors, and release some Windows Phone handsets.
What, do you people own stock in the company or something? Seriously, hold the bitching until the two-year mark. Things like this take time to get straightened out, and the company already seems pretty busy lately. Not to mention they have a tendency to be pretty secretive sometimes… anyone remember the deal with GrandCentral? People were all fired up for a good amount of time and now we’ve got Google Voice, which is one hell of a cool service. Never know… maybe they have really big plans and don’t want to spill the beans just yet. 11 months is nothing.
Chances are, whether Google bought them or not Motorola cell phone owners would have to wait an eternity for an OS update… just like owners of pretty much every other brand of Android phone. It’s not like Motorola customers are getting some kind of extra-bad treatment or something (although it is odd that the buyout effectively made both the phone manufacturer and the OS developer the same company).