Google To Acquire Motorola Mobility For $12.5 Bill

zacharye writes "Google and Motorola Mobility have announced an agreement whereby Google will acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price equates to $40 per share of Motorola stock, or a premium of 63% over Friday's closing price. The move is considered to be an effort that will better-align Google to compete with Apple's iPhone, which currently owns two-thirds of profits among the world's top-8 smartphone vendors..." That's one way to stop royalty payments.

Comments

is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Or did shit just get real? :-)

Re:is it just me

[erroneus]

Oh yes it can. If the terms for Google's new IP are up for renewal or renegotiation, you can expect cross-licensing deals and all sorts of things protecting Android phones and devices.

What this doesn't protect against is trolls like Mark Small, Nathan Myhrovld and all those. "Defensive" patents are a useless strategy against trolls since they have nothing to gain by cross-licensing any tech.

You know, if the incentive for copyrights and patents are to encourage creativity, then it certainly wouldn't hurt anything if the creators were not allowed to sell their intellectual property.

Re:Not a bad chioce

[localman57]

This might work out ok then. Because I think Google has some software guys.

Re:Didn't see this one coming

[Andy Dodd]

I keep seeing people claim that locked bootloaders are a carrier demand... When this is clearly NOT the case.

Across ALL carriers, at least in the United States:
None of the Samsung Galaxy S line have locked bootloaders. (Tab 7s may be mildly locked?) The exception is the Galaxy Tab 10.1 line, which actually has randomly locked bootloaders for the non-carrier-distributed wifi version. (Don't know about the Verizon LTE variant). Even then, the bootloader locking is fairly minimal. The closest to "bootloader locking" I've seen in a Samsung Android phone is locking out flashing alternate bootloaders (Infuse 4G), but never a bootloader that locked out flashing any kernel or userland you wanted.
A small number of HTCs came out locked in early 2011 - HTC quickly reversed this decision after user outcry. The locked phones were distributed across multiple carriers.
Nearly all Motorola Android phones are locked down, regardless of carrier.

Motorola may claim it's the carrier - but if you look at the trends across carriers vs. trends across manufacturers, the trend CLEARLY follows the manufacturer and not the carrier.

Re:Didn't see this one coming

[93 Escort Wagon]

I bet other Android manufacturers are even more worried, now that Google owns their own hardware too. Suddenly all the Android manufacturers are using a competitors product and then trying to fight against them too. This is also why Nokia's stock price is rising up. It's bad times for those other Android vendors, and I think they're already looking at something else than Android.

I'm pretty sure Google would be aware of that concern; they've already stated that it will remain as a separate business, and I expect that's because the last thing they want to do is be seen to be competing with their own partners. I'd guess this purchase was forced by the patent situation and not because Google really wants to get into manufacture.

Of course they say that; what do you expect? Companies have teams of lawyers and PR professionals whose whole job is to come up with the right things to say.

The question is - why do you automatically believe it? I doubt you'd give any other company the same benefit of the doubt. Did you assume Comcast was being completely forthright with everything it said while purchasing NBC?