I'm not sure what this article is implying. Is Google killing Motorola? Prepping it and slimming it down to become the Nexus product maker?
Neither, but it definitely is making cuts.
Nexus seems to have evolved into a strategy to maintain the health of the Android OEM ecosystem, to prevent a dominant OEM player from establishing itself (read: Samsung). To that end, it's hard to think that one OEM (Motorola) would become the sole Nexus supplier.
However, Motorola is Google now.
If Google has to decide to back one OEM to compete with Samsung... from a business sense, they should back Motorola.
I wonder if as part of the deal they couldn't make cuts for a year?