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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

Only part of Motorola, and not generally the part considered the "original". :)

Motorola mobility was spun off of the main company in January - I think at the time there was commentary on the stock markets that it was done with the aim to get someone to buy it.

So Motorola will exist still - as Motorola Solutions (it is the bigger & more profitable part of the company anyway) and Google get a phone manufacture division under their control.

Interesting move.

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They did it for the patents. Larry Page: "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies."

Seems like the best jobs at Google will soon be the lawyers, not the engineers.

Many patent lawyers are engineers.

Most of them come from an engineering background (at least education), you're right.

It's fascinating to me to see this shift, which Google seems to be leading, from tech companies fighting over new product development - and spending gobs of cash on it - to something entirely different: fighting over patents (and again, spending gobs of cash on it). Where a company spends its cash is a good measure of where its priorities are, and I'm not sure what that says about Google.

"It's fascinating to me to see this shift, which Google seems to be leading, from tech companies fighting over new product development...to something entirely different: fighting over patents "

I thought it was Microsoft and Apple that were aggressively filing patent lawsuits, and Google and other Android partners were on the receiving end, no?

One other thing I don't see being mentioned anywhere in these threads is that, "Motorola Mobility held $5.5B in cash and deferred tax assets; this could put Google's (GOOG) real purchase price around $7B."[1]

[1]http://seekingalpha.com/article/278932-can-motorola-mobility...

That's what I find interesting about this deal. It's still motivated by patent protection, but instead of putting it all in a defensive patent portfolio, they get a hardware company to innovate with as well.

How is Google leading that charge exactly? From what I can tell they've been drug kicking and screaming into this mess. It simply says that they have to come up with a way to defend against the patent mess that the Apple consortium has threatened them with.

A lawyer who's also an engineer is a powerful entity.

Am I the only one who imagined some sort of RPG character after reading this comment?

A character who can do magic no other can: sufficiently advanced technology.

Yeah, but he'd level really slowly.

Yup, after I got my masters and then got laid off I got an offer from a patent law firm to put me through law school if I'd come work for them. Patent law sort of sounded like one of the circles of Hell for me, though, so I didn't take them up.

What law school? Were you allowed to choose?

That wasn't discussed, and I imagine it would involve what I got into when I applied.

I suspect it is a little from column A and a little from column B; he did also talk about it being good for the user experience etc.

They get patents and a manufacturing arm (which then gives them control of the entire product cycle for Android).

The latter is a logical move; a lot of Apple's success comes from controlling all aspects of the iPhone. I know Android is open software, but internally for Google it makes sense to drive product development from the hardware side too.

I'm very curious to see the smartphones that will be coming out of Googorolla.

Google's been promoting the "top end phone with fast updates" with their Nexus line which makes me wonder if Motorola-manufactured Androids are all going to be top of the line models.

I was under the understanding that their old phones were top of the line, e.g. the first Motorola Droid.

I own a "first" Droid, so I'm assuming that was sarcasm.

So do I. It's VERY old now and I'm very excited about the Droid bionic, but when it came out, it was a very nice piece of equipment, probably the best droid with a keyboard for its time, notwithstanding the buttons-falling-off-from-too-much-texting issue.

You know. The interesting thing here is; I had a Droid via work when it came out (and it was a beast). I also got my personal contract iPhone 3GS the same time.

Thew droid felt defunct somewhere in the middle of last year (and thus I upgraded), but my iPhone still feels awesome, even though I know positively that I am holding out an upgrade till iPhone 5 in a few months.

I've never really considered it from that perspective before... but nevertheless interesting. There is possibly something there that Android needs to look into.

Are you kidding? It was a beast when it came out.

I wonder how many patents were transferred to the new company. Motorola certainly has a lot and MSFT and Apple have been overpaying lately...

http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Motorola-Mobi...

http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/01/did-motorola-just-hint...

~24,500 (~17000 Granted and ~7000 Pending)

Looks to me like they bought patents with a phone hardware company thrown in.

That number of patents is "proof" that the patent system is broken. I have nothing against patents, but they need to describe actual innovations.

I have problems believing they had 24500 real innovations. If a company can produce 24500 patents, then most are not what I think of as innovations but just a result of standard engineering work.

You don't actually have to build something to file a patent. You just imagine what it might look like. You can do that pretty quickly.

A patent is a finite time period monopoly on the use/practice/sale of an invention. To innovate means to introduce something new. The two concepts aren't the same. E.g. You can patent something economically useless, you can patent something and not build it. As a practical matter its not clear to me if you can or should require patents to be linked to innovations.

What exactly is "Motorola Mobile" and what is the rest of Motorala? I saw that in the news headline and figured there was going to be a lot of confusion over what actually got bought.

Motorola spun off into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Think of Mobility as the classic consumer oriented Motorola who sells cell phones. Solutions targets enterprise/government.

They're roughly broken down as follows:

Moto Mobile: general consumer devices (phones, tablets, GPS nav, DSL/cable modems, IPTV boxes, etc.)

Moto Solutions: enterprise and industrial stuff (2-way radios, RFID, barcode scanners, networking)

I think a lot of people are missing that they make stuff like DSL modems and IPTV too. If I was google I'd be interested in having a piece of that too.

In a few years we will have Motorola vs Nokia under new names, Google vs Microsoft. Apple will still hold strong onto their upper 5%.

What is there under $12 billion? 17000 patents, but how many employees, and what sales stats?

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