What Does Google’s Acquisition of Motorola Mobility Mean For Android?
You have probably heard by now that yesterday Google announced that it will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, which is about $12.5 billion and that’s at a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday.
Larry Page – Google’s Co-founder and CEO – in his blog post yesterday mentioned that this move was aimed at “supercharging Android” and its ecosystem.
Although Larry stated that this move will not affect Android’s openness as a platform, and Google will continue to work with other hardware partners (like HTC and Samsung) to promote the OS, speculations were rife on what exactly was on Google’s mind that led to this huge acquisition.
Ron Miller, in his interesting post, goes on to say that this move could sabotage Android’s worldwide success because Google now will directly compete with other Android handset makers and this undermines the open source nature of Android because Google is the one who developed it at the first place. So it has distinct advantage over other Android handset makers.
Later during the day, in a conference call, Google clarified that the move was also aimed at getting hold of the patents that Motorola Mobility has. Google will gain almost 17,000 patents, which, in their own words, will “enable them to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.
If you were to ask me, I am a little skeptical. Getting hold of Motorola’s patents makes sense but now that Google has a huge mobile handset maker under its belt, the prospect of playing a fair game with other handset makers looks bleak. Google’s motto of “don’t be evil” has come under fire a lot of times so we will need to wait and watch how this pans out. I hope that this doesn’t adversely affect Android’s popularity and development in any way.
What do you think about this move by Google? Will Android continue to flourish as the best open source mobile OS ever?
P.S: Motorola Mobility is one of the two parts that Motorola was split into earlier this year (the other one being Motorola Solutions). Google has only acquired the former.
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Since cell phones aren’t Google main source of income, I fully expect that the patents will be used as “game changing” litigation stoppers.
It will no longer be a question of “My portfolio is bigger than your portfolio so you can’t play.”
Once the acquisition is complete, I fully expect Google to open-source the patents and make the innovation open to all. (Its a lot easier to do that and abandon it to the vagaries of the market when you’ve just changed the nature of the market itself. While everybody’s scrounging to defend themselves, Google is doing well by doing good.)