Court Approves Google's Bid For Nortel's IP

Meshach writes "A court had approved Google's bid to take ownership of Nortel's arsenal of $900 million worth of patents and patent applications. Other bidders will have until June 13 to submit competing offers. Unfortunately, neither shareholders of Nortel nor the company's employees waiting for a pension will see any of that money."

Comments

$900M does not go very far

[RichMan]

$900M is less than what the last 3 CEO's of Nortel walked out the door with in salaries and benefits. We really really need a corporate revolution where executives are not rewarded in ridiculous amounts.

John Roth pocketed $100M in 2000.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2001/03/14/nortel010314.html

If CEO's get options they should be at only a slight discount on the current stock price and not execisable for 20 years. Long term value is what is needed. Not short term decisions which strip assets and long term strength in trade for short term magic accounting numbers.

Re:$900M does not go very far

[rmstar]

I think the system is working here. Companies that make smart decisions survive. Companies like Nortel that pay zillions of dollars to people running the company into the ground do not survive.

Is that sarcasm? You surely have not missed that those running the company to the ground and those that decided their pay were the same people? It is the common worker at such a company that suffers the consequences of the bad decisions taken by the good folks with the golden parachutes. The system is not working at all!

Re:$900M does not go very far

[msauve]

Huh? If you're an exec with 100K options in Company X it's in your interest to make good decisions which in turn drive up the share value.

If, by "good decisions," you mean illegally cooking the books to show greater profits than actually exist. That's exactly what happened at Nortel, and it was driven by executive compensation incentives. Of course, the ultimate result of those "good decisions" was the failure of the company.

Re:Since Google is an advertising company

[mr1911]

If Google did not have a large patent portfolio they would likely be sued out of existence very quickly. Patent portfolios are a necessity.

Re:Since Google is an advertising company

[Reapman]

If I've learned anything about mobile hardware, it's that it's a mine field of litigation and patents. Often the biggest complaint I hear about Android and Google is that they don't have enough patents to fight off the big guys of the mobile world - likely this is to resolve that situation.

Compared to the alternatives I still would trust them more then the others. I guess I'm from the generation that still remembers Google as the ones that, in a way, saved the Internet from itself. Without a good reliable search engine the Internet is pretty useless - Google fixed that by not allowing better rankings by paying more $$$. They proved you don't have to pull crap like that to make money. With that said Google is a company - no company should be 100% trusted, but so far I haven't been burned by them.

The biggest complaint I've heard is that Google sells my information. Well, let's see.. I use Google.com, and I use an Android phone. So far nobodys broken my legs. I haven't received excessive spam (Well, maybe, but GMail does a good job of blocking them if I have), nobody calls my phone asking to sell me stuff. So far all I've seen are... local ad's when searching. I am ok with that.

Re:Since Google is an advertising company

[DaMattster]

IMHO, this is a good thing for open source. Google has proved its intentions are good with the webm project and google talk.