It's not a matter of "winning," it's a matter of gaining enough value to repay the investment.
It would need not only to allow them to keep their currently growing market share, but to substantially increase it, in order to actually pay off. All the time, navigating a newly acquired, large organization, through profitability; one that as of recent has not been profitable.
Either way you see it, it is still a gamble with very high risks.
Your comment intrigues me, for it resembles closely what I was thinking.
Google has been looking to become vertically integrated for a couple of years now, but up until now it has not exactly worked as planned.
I believe that it has only recently become evident to Google that their grandiose plans of a Web 2.0 world, the one in which the mighty Web is the sole interface to information, services, and entertainment, where all roads lead to--or more to the point, through--the One Central Google Hub; those masterful and artful plans have been utterly devastated.
In short, ChromeOS is dead, and they needed a replacement
The problem was that most (if not all) their eggs were in that basket. Enter their previously unfavored (albeit highly popular) basket: Android.
The Motorola acquisition therefore is less about the patents (even if it still is about the patents), and more about shifting their vertical integration plans to Android devices along the lines of the iPhone and iPad. I suspect their focus will be more on the latter model, since their foray into the smartphone market did not end too well.
I'm not so sure about this strategy being brilliant. It is very ambitious, for sure, but very risky as well.
Furthermore, I still believe it was a stratagem devised in the nick of time out of desperation, when they saw that patents were about to crush in on Android, and their long-term plans to take over content consumption with cheap, Web-only devices were going nowhere. They could no longer let Android traverse its own titanic course.
If Google put the MMI patents into a community cross-license pool, they get a huge amount of goodwill and they also attract a lot of other patents into the CCL pool from their 31 Android partners.
In the real world, corporations--run by people--do not spend $12.5 Billion to give the acquired assets away. It is not very clear that goodwill alone will bring back enough value to repay such a considerable investment. Google is, after all, a publicly traded enterprise, beholden to shareholders.
In other words, even if your scenario were the true case--which I highly doubt--it still represents a huge gamble with exceptional risks.
That gives credence to the notion that it may have been an act of desperation, where Google saw such risk was higher than had they stayed their current course.
A corporation is not a person, but it is run by people. People are persons.
Would you stop your semantic bitching if the parent poster replaced "Google" with "Larry Page" or the names of several people on the board?
These persons making the decisions for the corporation are affected by emotions, which colour their judgement. This sometimes leads to completely irrational results, or more subtly, mistakes in long term strategy.
I read the report produced by the Google Futures project (AKA "Through the Looking Glass"), and I notice the following curious state of affairs: Apple was still making money with mobile devices (apparently Steve Jobs brain was preserved in a jar); Google owned the Internet, wholesale; Microsoft was touting their latest Windows 14 as "the most secure operating system yet"; Mozilla's Firefox v47.1 was still bloated, crashed every other tab, and oddly enough, still managed to introduced an entirely new tool bar that confounded even the most die hard fans. Oh, and Linux was still relatively unknown as a desktop operating system.
Ah, the memories. I remember being naive, and searching frantically around the intertubes looking for a "how to" document explaining how to employ the "Ping Of Death" that I just recently read about.
My search took me to IRC, where--true to n00b form--I proceeded to ask a very dumb question:
DZ> Can someone show me how to do the ping of death? Someone> Like this...
[blue screen]
My girlfriend was right next to me and thought it was the funniest thing. I did so too. Eventually I played the same trick on other unsuspecting kiddies.
I read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and find little relevance here. I take your point as valid, but I disagree with it. In a Bazaar, the idea is that it is a collective of ideas and hence the diversity of offerings. All participants are of equal value and stature, and all get to call the shots. It's like running an industry by committee. It is an honourable goal for sure, but doesn't always work best. I do agree with most of Mr. Raymond's ideas, I just do not necessarily agree with the practicality of some of them.
More to the point, Google is not a Bazaar, and does not even attempt or presumes to be one.
Google is a large corporation, run by a board and various levels of management, as many other companies. They are trying to expand their reach beyond their single profit center so far: web search advertising. As such, Google is closer to Microsoft in the early 2000s than the Apache project: they see someone making money in one market, decide "let's try that," and throw money at it to see what happens.
My central point is that Google has no centralized vision of what they want to do or be. They know they are making hand over fist in search ads, but like Microsoft, they know that this well will eventually dry up and they need to diversify. And that's where their internal compass breaks.
Should they be a mobile platform or a PC operating system provider? A social network or an applications framework developer? Should they be a SaaS provider or just a cloud infrastructure?
Of course, they could be all at the same time, but the fact that they don't put equal focus nor equal marketing muscle, nor equal engineering effort behind them suggests that they are not really sure which one to go for. And this hesitation is what reveals their lack of internal direction.
They have so many brilliant people, at least one of them--any one of them--must be able to come up with the next killer thing. They have a pot full of undercooked spaghetti, made by a thousands hands, and they're throwing it all at the wall to see which ones stick.
Thanks for turning this into a personal attack, that shows brilliant debating skills.
As per your own comment, a "pan-European injunction" covers all of the EU, and does not require individual litigation on each country--except in the Neatherlands, where the laws are different. This is according to the article.
This is different than what you said. You claimed that the court ruling only applied to Germany, and that Apple would have to "sue separately, according to the law of each country."
OK, so he's an asshole and you don't like him. What's inaccurate or biased about his comments on this particular piece, that Samsung is prevented from selling the Galaxy Tab in Europe?
Actually, read the sources: the injunction, or whatever it is called in Europe, is to stop selling the devices in all of the European Union countries, except Neatherlands.
Slashdot Mirror
"Google knows what it is doing and certainly they know how to make a business plan."
Citation needed.
Notice that at no time is Apple calling it anything. In fact, Apple hasn't announced the feature at all, whether app or bundle.
-dZ.
Who was fucking Fiat, Chrysler? I thought nobody liked the French. Or are they Italians? Cool then.
-dZ.
No, that one's based on the C=64 ROM.
-dZ.
It's not a matter of "winning," it's a matter of gaining enough value to repay the investment.
It would need not only to allow them to keep their currently growing market share, but to substantially increase it, in order to actually pay off. All the time, navigating a newly acquired, large organization, through profitability; one that as of recent has not been profitable.
Either way you see it, it is still a gamble with very high risks.
-dZ.
Your comment intrigues me, for it resembles closely what I was thinking.
Google has been looking to become vertically integrated for a couple of years now, but up until now it has not exactly worked as planned.
I believe that it has only recently become evident to Google that their grandiose plans of a Web 2.0 world, the one in which the mighty Web is the sole interface to information, services, and entertainment, where all roads lead to--or more to the point, through--the One Central Google Hub; those masterful and artful plans have been utterly devastated.
In short, ChromeOS is dead, and they needed a replacement
The problem was that most (if not all) their eggs were in that basket. Enter their previously unfavored (albeit highly popular) basket: Android.
The Motorola acquisition therefore is less about the patents (even if it still is about the patents), and more about shifting their vertical integration plans to Android devices along the lines of the iPhone and iPad. I suspect their focus will be more on the latter model, since their foray into the smartphone market did not end too well.
I'm not so sure about this strategy being brilliant. It is very ambitious, for sure, but very risky as well.
Furthermore, I still believe it was a stratagem devised in the nick of time out of desperation, when they saw that patents were about to crush in on Android, and their long-term plans to take over content consumption with cheap, Web-only devices were going nowhere. They could no longer let Android traverse its own titanic course.
-dZ.
In the real world, corporations--run by people--do not spend $12.5 Billion to give the acquired assets away. It is not very clear that goodwill alone will bring back enough value to repay such a considerable investment. Google is, after all, a publicly traded enterprise, beholden to shareholders.
In other words, even if your scenario were the true case--which I highly doubt--it still represents a huge gamble with exceptional risks.
That gives credence to the notion that it may have been an act of desperation, where Google saw such risk was higher than had they stayed their current course.
-dZ.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster, perchance?
OMG! I knew it! They're all pirates!!!
-dZ.
So, what's your point now? Is $12.5 Billion barely a dent for Google, or is it a substantial amount, higher than their last years' total earnings?
Is it a trivial amount that can be spent without remorse or consequence, or is it important enough that warrants saving your pennies to reach?
-dZ.
Sounds interesting. Whence can I stream the first season of your show?
-dZ.
A corporation is not a person, but it is run by people. People are persons.
Would you stop your semantic bitching if the parent poster replaced "Google" with "Larry Page" or the names of several people on the board?
These persons making the decisions for the corporation are affected by emotions, which colour their judgement. This sometimes leads to completely irrational results, or more subtly, mistakes in long term strategy.
-dZ.
I don't care what you or Lucas says, or how much he wants to popularize the stupid character; Han still shot first.
-dZ.
Sure, then how about spelling them appropriately too?
I read the report produced by the Google Futures project (AKA "Through the Looking Glass"), and I notice the following curious state of affairs: Apple was still making money with mobile devices (apparently Steve Jobs brain was preserved in a jar); Google owned the Internet, wholesale; Microsoft was touting their latest Windows 14 as "the most secure operating system yet"; Mozilla's Firefox v47.1 was still bloated, crashed every other tab, and oddly enough, still managed to introduced an entirely new tool bar that confounded even the most die hard fans. Oh, and Linux was still relatively unknown as a desktop operating system.
-dZ.
It does, I will say, iron shirts acceptably well.
-dZ.
You shouldn't overdo it, or you may end up transmogrifying into a large green mutant with super-human strength, at the slightest annoyance.
Then the military will be after you with tanks and helicopters, and--let's face--all hell breaks loose from there.
-dZ.
I had Win95 at the time, and it did bluescreen.
Ah, the memories. I remember being naive, and searching frantically around the intertubes looking for a "how to" document explaining how to employ the "Ping Of Death" that I just recently read about.
My search took me to IRC, where--true to n00b form--I proceeded to ask a very dumb question:
DZ> Can someone show me how to do the ping of death?
Someone> Like this...
[blue screen]
My girlfriend was right next to me and thought it was the funniest thing. I did so too. Eventually I played the same trick on other unsuspecting kiddies.
Funny.
-dZ.
I read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and find little relevance here. I take your point as valid, but I disagree with it. In a Bazaar, the idea is that it is a collective of ideas and hence the diversity of offerings. All participants are of equal value and stature, and all get to call the shots. It's like running an industry by committee. It is an honourable goal for sure, but doesn't always work best. I do agree with most of Mr. Raymond's ideas, I just do not necessarily agree with the practicality of some of them.
More to the point, Google is not a Bazaar, and does not even attempt or presumes to be one.
Google is a large corporation, run by a board and various levels of management, as many other companies. They are trying to expand their reach beyond their single profit center so far: web search advertising. As such, Google is closer to Microsoft in the early 2000s than the Apache project: they see someone making money in one market, decide "let's try that," and throw money at it to see what happens.
My central point is that Google has no centralized vision of what they want to do or be. They know they are making hand over fist in search ads, but like Microsoft, they know that this well will eventually dry up and they need to diversify. And that's where their internal compass breaks.
Should they be a mobile platform or a PC operating system provider? A social network or an applications framework developer? Should they be a SaaS provider or just a cloud infrastructure?
Of course, they could be all at the same time, but the fact that they don't put equal focus nor equal marketing muscle, nor equal engineering effort behind them suggests that they are not really sure which one to go for. And this hesitation is what reveals their lack of internal direction.
They have so many brilliant people, at least one of them--any one of them--must be able to come up with the next killer thing. They have a pot full of undercooked spaghetti, made by a thousands hands, and they're throwing it all at the wall to see which ones stick.
-dZ.
Thanks for turning this into a personal attack, that shows brilliant debating skills.
As per your own comment, a "pan-European injunction" covers all of the EU, and does not require individual litigation on each country--except in the Neatherlands, where the laws are different. This is according to the article.
This is different than what you said. You claimed that the court ruling only applied to Germany, and that Apple would have to "sue separately, according to the law of each country."
-dZ.
They're also called "trade dress," which represent the look and feel of products.
That's because Apple relied on copyright and a loosely interpreted license agreement with Microsoft.
Do you seriously not see the diffence with the current cases? Even the use of patents and trade marks point this out.
OK, so he's an asshole and you don't like him. What's inaccurate or biased about his comments on this particular piece, that Samsung is prevented from selling the Galaxy Tab in Europe?
Actually, read the sources: the injunction, or whatever it is called in Europe, is to stop selling the devices in all of the European Union countries, except Neatherlands.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/samsung/8691707/Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-10.1-blocked-in-Europe.html
So apparently, there is such a thing as "injunction in Europe." It may be called differently thoug, but the effect is the same.
dZ.
And it exchange of releasing it to the public, the inventor gets to charge a license fee.
So we both agree, if Samsung is copying Apple's inventions, they should pay them for a license, no?
The first step is an injunction until the courts can decide. So what's the problem here?
OK, now I've truly seen it all.
That's it for me!