Category: punditry

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Well, That Took Long Enough

A lovely centered picture.

Friends,

News has come down today that newish Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, in a financial call today, killed the company’s PC and mobile device business (not the calculators! Nooooo!) in favor of their server, software and services business. This, dear readers—even though I’m not at all bitter—comes a little late, don’t you think? Carly’s purchase of Compaq ten years ago cast my life and the lives of my dear friends into a wee little bit of turmoil, so only now I can sit back here in my Secret Alpine Laboratory and gloat a little. But only a little.

I’ve spent the day thinking about how the timeline was damaged by the HP/Compaq merger. We’ve all figured out how to deal with it in the ensuing decade, but what could we have done together if we’d been allowed to continue on an unperturbed path? It’s a fun thought experiment.

Not that I’m bitter,

– bob

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An Ad Agency Buys A Handheld Radio Manufacturer

 

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!