Motorola’s Value to Google Found in 18 Patents

Interesting. # of patents is a very misleading metric, in the same sense that # of lines of code really doesn't tell you much about quality. My intuition on the purchase is not that each patent is worth ~ 2/3 of a million dollars (~17K patents, ~12bln purchase price - so the math is a little off) or even 1/4 of a of a million dollar (divide by the premium paid that day ~5mm). I assumed that there were a couple big ones hidden in there that had most of the value from a grand strategic point of view. This isn't about nickel and diming everyone on small things, it's about controlling a few of the big ones that will stand up in court.

That said, I wasn't smart enough to figure out which subset were valuable on my own. Thanks for sharing!

Before anyone goes on to say that of all the patents these are the only useful ones, it's not really like that. First of all, the Courts won't accept many more patent infringement claims than around that number. You can't go to Court and claim patent infringement for 5000 patents. Oracle tried with a few hundred and the judge forced them to drop most of them. This means they're going to find as many that are some of the most useful ones.

Also, Apple claimed patent infringement on 20 patents against HTC, and they only won with 2 very old ones, and I think they won a few hundred millions with them. So it's good to keep that into perspective.

Even if Motorola loses in Court with about 20 of them in the first round, they can try with another 20 in another lawsuit later. This is why Microsoft and Apple will probably settle their patent disputes with Google. Google has too many patents now, more than Microsoft even.