I think Dan's probably wrong on this. First, in the Novell deal MS ended up getting most of their money back, they basically just licensed the patents (part of the DoJ deal).

For Nortel there were at least 5 other consortium members -- MS, Sony, and EMC paid a total of $800M (not sure of the exact split). Apple paid $2.6B.

My point is that by doing a consortium approach they actually spent relatively little money on it, and they all cross-license. Google, OTOH, is paying the full $12.5B for Motorola.