More Thoughts on Googorola

I was talking to a friend of mine in the United States last night.

He was telling me that he thinks that Googorola is going to end up as a colossal corporate folly.

His take on the whole deal is that Google rushed the deal. They rushed the deal because they didn’t have the patent pool to defend Android and they were under pressure to find some way to defend it. So they zeroed in on the grandaddy of cellular technology, the guys that invented the thing and made them an offer they couldn’t sensibly refuse.

They rushed the deal because they crapped out with the Nortel patent portfolio auction a little while ago.

If the stories that this deal was put together in the last five or six weeks are true then Google was desperately seeking patents which puts the comments by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha from about a week ago into perspective. He was playing brinksmanship with the Gnomes of Mountain View and they blinked, paying $12.5 billion for a company that lost $85 million last quarter!

Basically he said we’re gong to look at WinMoPho and sue the pants off all the other Android vendors.

And you can bet that Carl Ichan (one of Motorola’s largest shareholders) was happily wringing his hands in the corner wondering if Hanukah had come early.

The real question is, how many patents do Motorola have that will really help Google defend Android?

Its not going to help them in their fight against Oracle and I doubt its really going to help them in their fight with Apple over UI look and feel and its questionable if its going to help them in their arguments with Microsoft.

So if these Motorola patents aren’t going to help them in these three major battles then why?

I mean Redmond is asking Samsung for $15 per Android doohickey and I doubt that is going to change and they got General Dynamics, the granddaddy weapons of death and destruction globocorp to shell out a licence fee per Android doohickey.

This tells me that there may be something to the patents they’re showing everyone to get them to agree to paying the royalty.

Could it be the fact that Motorola were suing Microsoft for patent infringement as a reaction to Microsoft suing them “In October 2010, Microsoft sued Motorola for allegedly violating nine patents with its Android smartphones. “The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola’s Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone experience,” Gutierrez wrote in an Oct. 1 statement. Motorola later retaliated with an intellectual-property complaint of its own.”

This might be nothing more than posturing to negotiate a better “per doohickey” royalty fee.

I just wonder if Motorola just saw Google as desperate to wave a pile of patents at everyone and say “look at us…if you don’t play nice with us we’ll hit you with our patent portfolio”, especially after their debacle with the Nortel patents.

I also wonder if Motorola realise that their patent portfolio won’t help Google all that much which is why Google have to pay $2.5 billion if the deal DOESN’T go through. Like after they do their due diligence and find out that the patent pool of around 25,000 patents actually don’t help them all that much?

I really wonder how this is going to pan out for all concerned...