Google's Motorola Adventure: Stinging Defeat, Or Semi-Victory?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google had previously sold Motorola's Home division for $2.4 billion. Combine that with yesterday's $2.91 billion sale of Motorola's remaining assets, subtract the $12.5 billion acquisition price for the company back in 2011, and Google's little smartphone adventure cost it roughly $7.1 billion even before you start throwing in expenses related to actual production, marketing, and personnel. That's a hefty chunk of change, but some analysts think the deal was ultimately a good one because it allowed Google to pick up patents, engineering talent, and insight into the mobile-device marketplace. It's debatable, however, whether those patents ultimately helped Android in the still-raging smartphone wars, and Google was slow to promote Motorola smartphones out of fear of irritating other Android manufacturers. At least Google can console itself with the thought that so many of its other acquisitions—including YouTube and DoubleClick—resulted in massive profits; but you can't hit a home run every time you step up to bat."

Comments

Re:Not the whole story

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money

Re:The numbers

[Dishevel]

It is really cool that you will put yourself out like that on the internet and not even worry that you have demonstrated a complete lack of any real knowledge in the areas being discussed.

I wish I had that kind of Moxie!

Re:The numbers

[DickBreath]

Yes, but Motorola's patents are on trivial things such as radio technology, modulation techniques, compression and encoding, antenna designs, digital signal processing techniques, using very little power, frequency hoping, GSM, and other things.

Those patents are insignificant next to the innovations of bouncy scrolling and pinch to zoom!