Friends,
News came out this morning that Google is buying Motorola Mobility (the smartphone arm of Motorola) for twelve and a half billion dollars. That’s a premium over how Motorola shares were valued last Friday and carries with it, I think, the overwhelming odor of desperation.
Of course, everybody’s making a happy announcement about the sale, like how the synergistic metrics between the longtime global partner teams are now forming a more tightly integrated new paradigm, or somesuch, but doesn’t this mean that Google is now directly competing with LG, HTC, Samsung and all the other Android handset manufacturers? And won’t those same highly valued partners continue to wonder how Google is sandbagging every time an Android release comes out? If this is a reaction to the Nortel patent grab of a couple weeks ago by Apple, Microsoft and others, it seems to me that it’s a bit like putting out a camp fire by urinating on it without warning all the other campers to pull their marshmallows out first.
– bob
P.S. I use the first generation Motorola Droid for work and am as impressed by it as this guy.
UPDATE: Super creepy and eerily similar plaudits for the marriage here. We welcome the news!