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Comment by maguay | Hacker News Reader

Random things that strike me about this deal:

- HTC's stock price has been going down for the past 5 years, and EPS was down sharply recently. Does this make HTC more or less viable on its own going forward?

- Apple finally made a VR push with the upcoming macOS High Sierra and iMac Pro—along with the HTC Vive. Google didn't fully acquire HTC here, and HTC's trajectory was already tied to Android, but still seems an interesting wrinkle there.

- Samsung continues to hedge their bets, most recently with Bixby. Really wonder if Google's continued hardware investment will make them seek more of their own path.

- Why would Google acquire just a team from HTC? Seems like the oddest of acquihires yet.

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> Why would Google acquire just a team from HTC?

IIRC, The license agreement[1] between HTC and APPLE will be voided if HTC is acquired by another company, maybe this strategy can avoid this situation.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2012/11/11HTC-and-Apple-Settl...

and Apple is going to sit back and say "Oh Wow- Didn't see that coming"?. Don't bet on it- Apple will claim violation of their agreement.

If the letter of the agreement isn't violated then it isn't violated. Apple can't just retroactively rewrite it.

Of course depending on how it's written it is possible there could be some room for interpretation, which would likely end up being litigated, but I suspect these huge companies have teams of lawyers that are pretty careful about that kind of thing.

With the amount of money Apple has, they can, in practical terms.

As a negotiating tactic, if they really want and need to retroactively rewrite the contract they can say 'This is going to happen. You can agree, or we can spend money to destroy you legally and/or otherwise'. It depends on how badly they need to change the thing, but the amount of abstracted power they've got should they choose to wield it is enormous. At that point it becomes a game of personalities: does the CEO want to go to the mat on this one? Will the board go along? Bear in mind that shows of strength and ruthlessness will help the stock price, because those evaluating Apple for what it's worth are only interested in ruthlessness and power.

I think it's very silly to consider that laws mean anything anymore. In practice, only money matters. (in fact I don't approve of this, but that's my evaluation of how things stand, and how we got here)

From the link

>The terms of the settlement are confidential

Anything you know that we don't? Usually licenses stay valid after a company is acquired.

Some news during that time said about this, this may be the original source:

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/11/apple-htc-license-agreeme...

> In the event of a Change of Control of a party, this Agreement shall automatically terminate unless otherwise agreed in writing by the Parties, effective immediately prior to such Change of Control.

Sure, HTC had a couple of seminal 4G patents that forced Apple to cross-license back in 2012, but I'm not sure if such legal protection is of any use for Google today. Most of Apple's utility and design patents asserted against HTC and cross-licensed were found to be invalid or not infringed during Samsung trial. Further, unlike Samsung, Google is less likely to suffer from the jury bias that Samsung did, even if they end up in court for patent infringement. There is really nothing to fear. In any case, I don't think Google is doing this to acquire patents.

But not always. If someone were to acquire AMD wouldn’t they lose access to the Intel patents because of the way that deal was structured?

But wouldn't the potential AMD buyer have option to void deal for amd64 then? Serious question.

Depends on what the contract says. I'm guessing no because the Intel lawyers are not incompetent.

But neither are the AMD lawyers.

Except they got the license back in the distant past before anyone had any idea it would be so valuable.

Apple has to push something new (but iOS apps with AR were there as late as around 2011) and major "next big thing" to play catching up. Apple as a creature is done. It is just following the phenomenon momentum founded by Jobs to maximize profit. Once the day it goes past the max profit tipping point, what is real will show up. Money is the quantitive fact that few would go against, once this fact changes, opinions will soon emerge. My personal thoughts.

Apple will bring out iVision or something like HoloLense/Google Glasses. Same story as like the iPod.

Hopefully so.

Apple under Jobs showed polished deliverables to customers. Without him, Apple demoed prototypes more, talked about plans and fields they worked on more and tried to pumped up confidence by giving out information more. It's been like this for a few years. Not a short time in the tech world.

They did regroup and formed a new foundation that is quite strong. Positioning at product and service for privacy alone has no competitors in the near future. And they have everything needed to make customers believe in them (on the other hand, do customers really have other quality and trustworthy alternatives?).

The best product after Jobs from Apple, to me, is AirPods. That's the only product makes me amazed and satisfied.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple's approach on making product and an iOS developer myself.

I really really had hoped that somehow, magically, Jobs' death wouldn't hurt Apple's trajectory, but things don't seem to be playing out that way.

Right. They only managed a pathetic trippling in market cap since he died and have only dominated a single new industry (they're now the biggest watch company in the world by revenue, just from watches). How disappointing.

Wasn't talking about financial trajectory.

Ok, what then, Technology? None of the other handset makers are even close. 3D face recognition, computational photography, augmented reality, health, CPUs, security, privacy,display and build quality, App ecosystem. They're ahead of the pack across the board. The new multitasking, drag-and-drop and inter-app communications stuff in iOS 11 is so far ahead of Android it's almost cheating.

Yeah, why would HTC agree to something like this? Sounds like Google got a hell of a deal getting to pick which engineers and IP they want without having to buy the whole company.

If they think that division is doomed and this is more money than it would be worth if they kept it they might do it.

Or if they think EVERYTHING is doomed and they’re just hoping to get anything that might help save them.

Build a local team that a foreign project customer would have trouble hiring directly (due to being foreign), let the team prove itself on the project, hand them over for a massive fee. As long as the project/team customer is willing to pay good money for this it is perfectly fine business.

One time payment instead of continuous revenue from future projects. The difference is that the one time is money in the bank, whereas future project work is merely a possibility that might fail to realize. In the end it is a question of the right price and I get the impression that this one has been very generous (even after discounting for the IP.

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