Monday, August 15, 2011

dramatic moves in phone wars: google to buy motorola mobility; will microsoft now buy nokia?

this is a pretty dramatic! talk of pre-emptive strike!

Google to Buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion

 Google announced on Monday that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the cellphone business that was split from Motorola, for $40 a share in cash, or $12.5 billion. 

The offer - by far Google's largest acquisition - represents a premium of 63 percent to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday. Motorola is a Google Android partner. 

The deal will tap Google's considerable warchest and give the search giant valuable patents that it can likely use to battle with its smartphone rivals, Apple and Microsoft.

so google has decided that the downside of being a full hardware + software provider is balanced by motorola's trove of patents. i imagine the big reason for google to buy motorola mobility is to acquire firepower in the patent battles.

so google finally will have the full stack -- h/w and s/w, and i wonder how its other h/w partners will view this -- will it make samsung and htc, for instance, rethink their android plans?

the patent trolling by apple and oracle and microsoft has probably driven google into this decision.

this now puts a whole new angle on nokia -- why shouldn't microsoft also have a captive phone maker for its windows 7?

gee, it's fun and games!

1 comment:

sansk said...

Obviously, Patents drive economy downward. Google has, and has used, a lot of money for getting what .... Patents !
In a real free market economy Patents would be anathema.