Google has announced that it will buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It has been approved by the directors of both companies and should pass regulatory approval by the end of the year. With some 19,000 employees, revenue of $11 billion, and assets of $6 billion, Motorola Mobility is certainly not the biggest manufacturer of its kind — both Samsung and Nokia are many times larger, both in terms of revenue and market share — but this doesn’t make Google’s purchase any less significant. For a start, $12.5 billion is almost half of Google’s cash reserves — but more importantly, Motorola Mobility inherited some 17,000 patents when it was separated from Motorola Inc. in January 2011, and these patents will pass directly to Google.
To put this into perspective, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and others paid $4.5 billion for 6,000 of Nortel’s patents — and most of those weren’t even related to GSM, 3G, and 4G. Motorola on the other hand, with its long history of analog and digital cellphones, is up there with Nokia and Ericsson when it comes to wireless communications patents. In other words, for almost three times as much money, Google has purchased almost three times as many patents — and unlike Apple and Microsoft, which only got a few useful patents from Nortel, Google has secured thousands of mobile-related patents.
This story isn’t about Motorola Mobility’s patent portfolio, however. Nor is this a diatribe about the evils of software patents and the poor, coerced, little and innocent Google being forced to defend itself by plunking down half its money as a rearguard action. You can read that story on about 500 other websites.
The actual news is that Google is now a manufacturer of smartphones and tablets. Google has made the jump from purely software — like Microsoft — to software-and-hardware, like Apple.
For a start, this means we can say goodbye to any more HTC- or Samsung-built Nexus smartphones or tablets; they will almost certainly be built in-house at Googola. Crucially, however, consider what will happen to the 39 sanctioned Android device manufacturers: until now they all had equal access to the latest Android source code, but now… how long will it be before Motoroogle gets early access to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 5.0 Jello? In Google’s official announcement of the Motorola acquisition, CEO Larry Page says that “Android will remain open,” that Motorola will be run “as a separate business”, and that “Motorola will remain a licensee” — but there’s nothing to the effect that Motorola will not receive special treatment from its new Google overlords.
As we’ve already seen with the very late arrival of the Honeycomb source code, Google definitely reserves the right to do what it likes with “unready” versions of Android — and that could easily involve giving Motorola insider access to the latest code commits. To pour salt into the handset manufacturer’s wound, Android’s Apache 2.0 license wouldn’t stop Motorola from forking Android and making a special or “Google-optimized” version — and better yet, Google could even lend some of its Android developers to Motorola, if it wants to keep the split nice and tidy.
This isn’t to say that Google will immediately or intentionally scupper its relationship with the likes of Samsung and LG, however — and it’s possible, though incredibly unlikely, that this purchase really is all about the patents. It is far more likely that we will now see the slow transformation from a software giant that relies on search for 97% of its income to a company with a healthy interest in both software and hardware, like Apple.
Motorola and Google is an almost perfect marriage. Unlike Microsoft, which produces huge margins on its software, and Apple, which produces beautiful and highly-profitable devices, Google has always given away the bulk of its services for free in exchange for advertising revenue. With Motorola under its wing, Google can now emulate Apple and produce proprietary software that only works on shiny, desirable Motorola phones and tablets, and the possibilities that have opened up are really quite extensive: Motorola-built Chrome OS tablets, Motorola-built Google TV boxes, customized Android smartphones and tablets with deeper Docs and Google+ integration, devices that tailor made for the recently-formed (and very quiet) Google Games division — and much, much more.
To conclude, then, Google has secured a ton of patents that should secure itself and its Android licensees from the hulking 800lb primate paws of Microsoft and Nokia — but it has also opened up new and exciting channels of distribution for Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and the hoard of other software packages that have been produced at the Googleplex. It certainly cost a lot of money for the privilege — but that’s what cash is for, right?
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar