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Today, Google announced its acquisition of Motorola Mobility for not less than $12.5 billion in cash. And I completely agree with Forbes’ contributor Eric Jackson, who states that
[i]f you think this is about Google getting into the handset business, think again. If Google were to get into the handset business, they would turn their back on partners like HTC, Samsung and others.
Today’s deal is all about acquiring Motorola’s backlog of mobile-related patents. When Google lost out on the batch of Nortel patents, they worried that Android was significantly at risk.
A risk stemming from the fact that, in spite of developing Android under an open source license, powerful patent holders such as Microsoft were able to squeeze out licensing fees from corporate Android users. The bizarre result being that Google, the main developer of Android, gives away its contributions to the operating system for free while its not-contributing competitor Microsoft charged hardware producer HTC $5 for any shipped Android (!) smartphone (see business insider). Read the rest of this entry »