I don't have a problem necessarily with what the article is trying to paint - Motorola acquisition, like many other complex decisions involving lot of factors, can go either way for Google. But that's not the interesting part.<p>To get at the likelihood of best case and worst case you can't put out the unknowns and assume each unknown is likely to have a bad outcome and then conclude with fear uncertainty and doubt.<p>One such unknown is credibility of Motorola's patents. Scratch Florian Mueller and MG doesn't know squat about this. No one but Google's lawyers do. In so far as Google's lawyers are not idiots in spending $12.5B on the patents without having some plan on utilizing/monetizing them AND Motorola has actually not lost a patent lawsuit against Microsoft or Apple _yet_ and/or they aren't paying royalties to them yet, it is premature to conclude that Motorola's patents won't go far enough. That's exactly what MG says is likely to be the case.<p>Then there is the bias, that makes MG again rely on something insubstantial and unverifiable - How the PR notes of various Android OEMs were worded. MG claims that makes the Android OEMs look disingenuous. Less professional, may be - but disingenuous? I don't think so. Patent royalties are a threat to the OEMs and they know it well. If Google could put a patent pool up that they start with 25000 patents and growing and it convinces other manufacturers to contribute to it under the OHA - it benefits the OEM immensely and they know it. What is the other alternative for the OEMs? Go Windows Phone 7? Nice idea but it hasn't made a dent yet and if it does they can be sure to pay what Microsoft damn well demands - including choking their own throats with exclusive licensing agreements. For the OEMs it is clearly in their best interest to go where Google wants them to go. And Motorola for them was always a competitor - that hasn't changed with the acquisition.<p>Here is another nonsensical thing - MG says Google will be forced to make Motorola design better phones/tablets and that will mean they play partial to Motorola. He ignores the fact that Google is all about more handsets running Android. And Motorola isn't even remotely capable of addressing even 1/3rd of the potential smartphone market worldwide - Google needs HTC/ZTE/Samsung to fill in. Badly. There is just no way Google will want to even try to screw over them. And the OEMs can always up their game and compete well with Motorola on hardware, software update frequency, price and features. That doesn't change. Bottom line? Little incentive for Google to screw over the OEMs and little to no new adverse impact of Motorola to the OEMs.<p>I wasn't expecting MG to write anything insightful but he asserted at the start of the article that he wasn't going to go all Dan Lyons and start opening his mouth to talk without understanding - so here.
We are in the midst of the intellectual property Cold War, and it's fascinating to watch. If Google can use Motorola's patents to balance the power in patent suits and avoid $20/device in licensing fees... well, they're activating 550k devices per day, so that's $11M/day in savings. Roughly 3 years to break-even on that basis alone.<p>Google can use Motorola to force the issues that have plagued Android for a while. Motorola devices will probably become "pure Android" devices like the Nexus series, pushing carriers to abandon the crapware and carrier-specific UIs they're infatuated with.<p>Most people I know with Motorola Android devices say the build quality is for crap. I hope Google can improve this, but if not, I hope they can at least get the carriers to quit layering garbage on HTC's nice hardware.
What is interesting is that the patent defense isn't just about Android... Motorola has a bunch of video patents that are now not problems for WebM. Given the MPEG-LA patent pool, probably not much that can be asserted for MAD, but they've at least defused a number of bombs previously pointed at WebM users.
<i>this is either the smartest thing Google has ever done, or the dumbest.</i><p>I've said that to myself many times. I've never had it (whatever "it" is) be the smartest thing I've ever done. To be fair, it is rarely the dumbest, either, though it tends to favor that.<p>If you find yourself thinking a choice will be this polar in outcome, you are probably making the wrong decision.<p>For the record, I don't think MG is right about this being the (binary) smartest or dumbest decision for Google.