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Google Bid Pi Billion Dollars For Nortel Patents
mikejuk writes "Google mystified other participants in an auction for patents last week by their choice of bids. They weren't the round regular numbers that are normally expected. After first bidding $1,902,160,540 — a reference to Brun's constant — and later bidding $2,614,972,128 for the Meissel-Mertens constant, they ended up submitting a bid for $3.14159 billion. Google ended up losing the auction — but was that a deliberate ploy?"
The deal fails when Nortel askes for exact change.
Google's CFO's glad they didn't take the next step after pi: tau (6.28...)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
If you're willing to bid $3 billion for something, the last thing you want is for someone to bid $3 000 000 001.00, and beat you in the bid. So it is quite routine for bids on large contracts with a closed bidding process to use unusual numbers rather than round numbers. I've seen this in multi-tens or hundreds of million-dollar land acreage bids for the rights to drill for oil. They'll bid $30 545 777.88, and weird things like that. Usually the "extra bit" is a small percentage of the total bid amount, but if you're going to do that, why not have some fun with it? And if you're "mystifying" the other participants, good! That's the whole point -- to keep them guessing and prevent them from figuring out your strategy so they can't bid $1 more.
All these bids are irrational numbers.
I think the message is clear. Patents have irrational value.
This is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from a group of guys who, once routinely stuffed into their high school lockers, have now grown up (?) to become full-fledged white cat-stroking Bond villains.
I give it another 6-9 months more of federal government inquiries and subpoenas before they dig a moat around their campus and fill it with laser-headed sharks...
That's a big piece of pi.
-Charlie
Lol, Google guyz are math Maniacs they have already done such stuff in past for many times, i remember 1 they raised their market Cap in 2004 by e-billion dollars $2,718,281,828.
to be so rich? it's investor money they were bidding with, they're just in control of it. as such you'd like to read reasoning for that in quarterly reports, not bullshit about how they saved few tens of millions by their "fx hedging program"(no shit, they really think that's worthwhile info to spend couple of slides on and then just skip over the billion dollar stuff). but did they even want to win the bids? did they have solid reasoning for the bids worth? did they even check what they were bidding on? they sure could have used some of those patents.. but I guess it's better for them to just keep out of the patents game for android devices and let the device manufacturers worry about that, have you noticed how android is not actually letting fresh new players enter the phone market? niche production numbers aside, only the same old moto, samsung, lg, huawei, sony-e etc are in the game and they got their patents and licensing for the patents covered. the problem is that if you'd like to enter the android market as a manufacturer you can buy all the chips you need - but nobody on earth is going to tell you who you have to make licensing arrangements with.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
We're bidding billions of dollars and we round Pi off at 5 decimal places?
They should have bid $3,141,592,653.59.
I'll bet dimes to dollars none of the principals on this deal "got it". It's science, after all, and scientists are just manual laborers, in the same sort of class as plumbers. The only good people in society are in finance and top corporate management.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's a nice round number.
-- QED
I'm pretty sure it wasn't the math gods they were trying to provoke.
Instead it looks as if they were in a non-serious bidding game to make the others over pay for what are probably soon obsolete patents anyway.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think what Google was after was
a) some additional PR (and they got it as we see)
b) a nod from the nerd community which sometimes seemed a bit alienated lately (and they got it also as one can see from the above comment)
And they even got it for free (-lawyers' costs) as they didn't win the auction. So much for waisting shareholder's money as someone claimed above.
End software patents, leave this consortium with 4.5 billions dollars worth of paper.
In any case, I hope this deal fails to pass regulatory inspection. Apple monopolizing smartphones with patents is probably worth 10-20 billion to them. No one should be able to monopolize technology. The whole idea of patents made more sense hundreds of years ago when everything was trade secrets, but in the information age it's just a way to create artificial monopolies on certain technologies.
You are assuming that some software patent reform doesn't happen. At some point when this becomes a big enough stink, something will change. Maybe all those billions will end up having been paid for worthless software patents. Now that would be a laugh. But it would be fitting. Paying billions for the ability to harm your competitors. It is beyond clear that these patents are being acquired for no other purpose.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The expected winning bid if everyone is rational and everything is ideal is the second highest valuation of all of the bidders in the room.
Ah, but Google have demonstrated that they're transcendental instead of rational.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
...to get another news headline on Slashdot? Well it worked.
How about the opposite? It's a way to bid strange numbers without the possibility of being accused of collusive bidding. It's a standard strategy on auction sites to bid a strange ending. Newbies bid round numbers. People who want to win against newbies bid a bit more than a round number. People who want to win against people who want to win against Newbies bid a strange number.
If Google had bid more or less random strange numbers, then they could be accused of signalling. Since they bid obvious well known numbers, there's no real extra information in there so they are safe from accusations of cheating. The same thing is done by cryptographers who
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
> Wait, what? You can buy constants now?
That was news to me, too. I thought you could only buy vowels!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Google has a sentient bidding algorithm and it's trying to communicate.