Thursday, January 30, 2014

The Motorola gambit: what Google really got by selling an American icon


By Nilay Patel and Ben Popper


Google’s romance with Motorola was star-crossed from the start. With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola it wasn’t just taking on an ailing manufacturer — challenge enough — but simultaneously competing with Google’s own hardware partners in the Android ecosystem, meaning it had to tread carefully. The payoff for all that heartache? Motorola’s impressive collection of 24,000 patents and patent applications. Unfortunately for Google, the much-ballyhooed war chest of intellectual property didn’t hold up in the courtroom.


Google’s initial motivation for buying Motorola was extremely simple: Motorola’s patent portfolio included core pieces of standard technologies like Wi-Fi and GSM. At...


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Source: The Verge - All Posts http://j.mp/1bCuWtz

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