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Comment by kubrickslair | Hacker News Reader

There have been a couple of stories where the formation of consortiums (Rockstar and Rangers) was discussed. This article smells a bit like lazy journalism:

>Then an unknown group calling itself Rockstar Bidco stepped forward with a whopping $4.5 billion offer — turning the Nortel sale into possibly the biggest intellectual-property auction of all time. The group, it turned out, was a coalition of Google’s biggest rivals in mobile phones.

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Yup, the whole thing looks like industry standard PR. Poor little Google one would hardly know they're a giant company who is using their search monopoly to undercut smaller competitors in the smart phone market.

> they're a giant company who is using their search monopoly to undercut smaller competitors in the smart phone market.

How exactly is Google using their search monopoly to undercut smaller (or larger for that matter) competitors in the smart phone market?

It's similar to MSFT vs. Borland, MSFT could undercut the compilers because they sold the OS. Compilers and developer tools are a complement to their core business. Smartphones are a complement to Google's search/adsense business.

To Google making sure that people have cheap smartphones increases their search revenue. It also ensures there will be a smart phone platform with Google defaults. On an Apple or RIM device MSFT might have enough dough or other leverage to change a search default. And on WinPhone7 you can be pretty sure the search default will be Bing.

It's not the same thing. MSFT would impede innovation with sneaky tactics (e.g. hide or change apis) in order to stay in the lead. I have yet to see Google do something like that. Google is winning by innovating.

It's free and open source, anyone can take the source code, modify it and sell it under their own name. In fact I've read that Baidu was doing exactly that. Some manufacturers have also changed the default search engine in Android to Bing.

By giving away free OS and services they are killing the paid OS model and using the search monopoly to subsidize for it. But as I said below everybody does that in one way or another. Nothing specific about Google. It's just that some ways are more easily discernible than others.

Everybody has their own moat, and they use theirs to win the game. Nothing specific about Google.

I don't understand what was wrong with that sentence or what made it lazy journalism? Is it not one of the largest IP auctions of all time or something?

It wasn't an unknown group that won. As the auction moved past the limits of various bidders and they dropped out of direct bidding, they joined up with remaining bidders, and the winning group was such a group. (So was the losing group).

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