Google to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5b

[Antony]

The internet search giant has announced that it is acquiring Motorola Mobility for US$ 12.5 billion. It is generally believed that patents are the main reason behind this acquiring, as Motorola's cellphone business has over 17,000 patents in its portfolio.

Google lightly mentioned the reason:

Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

According to Wikipedia:
Motorola Mobility was the mobile devices division of Motorola Inc. which was founded in 1928 and the home division. The divisions began trading as a separate independent company on January 4, 2011.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.19) Gecko/20110707 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.13 Firefox/3.6.19

[Mandrake]

I would have to imagine that with the acquisition of some 17000 patents there's enough in there to stave off Microsoft, Apple, Oracle etc and to protect Android phone/tablet makers.

That said Motorola are making some terrific phones now (The Atrix comes to mind) and I certainly hope that continues after the Google acquisition.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0

[Don_HH2K]

Even though the consensus is that Google bought Motorola Mobility for their patent portfolio, even if they have no intention to produce Google-branded handsets under the Motorola name, I can't help but wonder what this will mean for the other Android handset manufacturers like Samsung and HTC.

No handset maker wants to be downgraded to a second-class citizen, and I'd say that's a legitimate fear when the supplier of your software stack purchased one of your competitors. That's one of the big reasons that Windows Mobile originally took off on phones - Microsoft didn't make hardware to go along with its OS. By contrast, even though OSes like Palm's PalmOS and Nokia's Maemo could either be licensed or used freely, you didn't see non-Palm phones running PalmOS, or non-Nokia phones running Maemo, since there always was the chance that they'd make the platform exclusive.

Now given, Google probably wouldn't go make their platform exclusive to Motorola/Google-branded handsets - they're still primarily a software company, and that would be contrary to their business model. But it's always possible that later releases of Android may debut first on Motorola/Google phones, with releases coming later to other devices.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110624 Firefox/5.0-x64 PaleMoon/5.0-x64