Google dumping Motorola is genius | Hacker News Reader

Google dumping Motorola is genius

androidbeat.com

49 pointslibovness27 comments

Motorola is very much known outside the US. The Razr was one of the most popular pre-iphone phones.

Also the wild speculation in:

  Google probably told Samsung that they’ll get rid of Motorola if TouchWiz is taken behind the barn and put to sleep with one round of a deafeningly loud sawed off shotgun.

seems incredibly suspect to me.

Agreed, the article is grade A bull poop.

edit: it's actually reminiscent of the articles Prismatic usually recommends to me, which are so dumb they make me want to throw my laptop in a ditch and sew my eyelids shut. Incidentally, does anyone know how this happen? I love their site/approach to news, I'm just curious why their ML algorithms tend to churn out so much crap indiscriminately.

> Agreed, the article is grade A bull poop.

For what it's worth I thought the parts about plastic phones that go bleep and bloop was pretty funny. So not entirely poop. I'm going to make my Galaxy S4 bloop a bit now.

When? 8 years ago? Yes, Motorola is "known" as in "yes, I recognize that name", but they definitely don't have a "strong brand" outside of US anymore. Even in US, it was becoming quite weak before the Moto X/G (when it grew a little more because of Google's rebranding and advertising money).

I've actually gone into an Orange store last week and asked them about whether they are bringing Moto G. The store clerk looked at me confused and said "Motorola? We haven't sold Motorola phones in years".

Also, the Touchwiz thing wasn't really speculation on the author's part. It was published in Recode:

http://recode.net/2014/01/29/after-google-pressure-samsung-w...

Speculation is speculation. This one seems as reasonable as any other explanation for why Google dumped Motorola less than 2 years after buying it.

Motorola retreated from most international markets, and the overwhelming majority of sales now are in the US.

As to the supposed Samsung agreement, it does seem to be wild speculation and unsourced rumors, but then so were the other dozen front-pagers claiming it. However it is interesting that Samsung and Google just became the best of friends (the unprecedented patent agreement) at the same time that this agreement was happening. There are obvious reasons why Samsung (and LG, and Sony, and HTC, and...) would worry about Google owning Motorola.

Samsung has similar agreement with Sony (2011) and IBM (2004) so I wouldn't call Samsung-Google best buddies. Samsung does it with anyone who's worthy of Samsung's own stockpile of patents...

According to the author, most of Google's choices seem to be brilliant:

"With the Moto G, Google is executing Nokia’s strategy better than even Nokia themselves"

http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2013/11/moto-g-google-ex...

Just before announcing the acquisition he wrote an article:

http://www.intomobile.com/2012/04/17/rumor-google-keep-motor...

that while cautious ends with: "What do you think Google should do? We’re fans of them copying Apple’s business model."

But the press release must have been something awful because now he says: "Let’s face it, we all knew this acquisition was a mistake from the moment the press release dropped."

I believe the author meant the initial acquisition; that of Google purchasing Motorola Mobility to begin with.

> Motorola is going to teach Lenovo about having a small, yet highly focused product portfolio.

Not so sure about that. Prior to Google's acquisition, Motorola had a huge product portfolio. I would bet that they only slimmed it down under Google's direction. Furthmore, the ThinkPad brand itself isn't known for having a small product line.

They did. Google sold off motorola's set top box group at the end of 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/12/19/google-to-...

It is genius in the way that removing a railroad spike from your foot is genius. There was never anything good about Google owning a handset OEM that competes with their OEM partners and carrying Moto's headcount. Any ambiguity about whether Google intended to keep Moto was purely to optimize the price they would get for it.

When Lenovo bought IBM, their quality >did< take a significant hit, undermining one of the main arguments of this article.

"No one knows Motorola outside the United States" I stopped reading here, as the author has shown having absolutely no idea about the mobile market.

He is comparing it to the IBM-Lenovo deal and says, he had used the Thinkpads before. What this guy didn't know, Lenovo was building the Thinkpads long before IBM finally sold the brand completely to Lenovo. Before Lenovo was just a contractor like Foxconn. The deal was the only way for Lenovo to survive, because IBM wanted to get rid of its consumer business and IBM was a big customer of Lenovo.

But this deal is completely different.

You see, Lenovo used to be a company no one knew about, but then in 2005 they bought IBM’s PC division. As a former IBM ThinkPad fanboi, I was deeply worried that this no-name Chinese company would ruin everything, but they didn’t. They learned everything they could from IBM, kept making ThinkPads to the same degree of quality they’ve always made them.

The article lost all credibility after this.

Exhibit 99: The travesty that is the updated X1 Carbon keyboard.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/01/stop-trying-to-innovate...

You forgot an important part:

and then also released cheaper models that sacrificed very little

Is it genius to give someone your wallet when they have a gun pointed at you? Google's Android strategy has been great at getting Android out into the world, less good at giving Google control of the result. What's worse is that when this is over with, I don't see a lot of evidence that Samsung isn't still holding the gun.

The confound is that it's not entirely clear that Google views Android as part of it's long-term future anyway; they seem far more interested in ChromeOS from a long-term strategic point of view, God only knows why.

I never understood why ChromeOS is on the laptops, and Android is on smartphones/tablets. It would make much more sense the other way around -- ChromeOS is happier on an always connected device, and a phone is mostly useless if it isn't connected -- a match made in Heaven. Android only needs connectivity for specific applications, otherwise can run stand-alone for the most part. Perfect for a laptop environment.

Cellular data is often metered and frequently unreliable, making it a bad fit for always-on connectivity. The original ChromeOS plan was a variety of form factors:

http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-fac...

Which is why Android (or rather Google Play and its attendant apps) were kept off tablets for the longest time -- Google wanted ChromeOS to be its tablet OS. Android tablets were a reaction to the iPad's success and players like Amazon and B&N making successful inroads into the tablet markets using their own spins on Android. Google seems to rather consistently give off the impression that Android is viewed as a strategic detour away from their long-term ChromeOS plans, though, not as their future.

If they got Samsung to kill Touchwiz, or at least seriously tone it down, and follow Google's UI vision more, along with other stuff that leads to a stronger unification of the Android ecosystem under Google's own leadership, than giving up Motorola was totally worth it, considering Samsung owns 40 percent of the Android devices. So them adopting Google's more strict guidelines would be a sea change in the market.

I also think Google getting access to Samsung's patents for the next 10 years was pretty genius, because Samsung builds everything, and from what I've seen lately, Google is kind of moving in the same direction, too.

Quite the opposite in many parts of the world

"No one knows Motorola outside the United States. On the flip side, almost everyone knows who Lenovo is, except for the Americans."

All I got to say is that I am hoping Google didn't just kill an American company. I am not looking forward to another Palm company story where you had a great product that is NOTHING now, thanks to these companies buying each other out to simply kill the products/ideas.

It seems very clear to me: Google and Samsung signing an agreement, Google drops Motorolla weeks later.

Mmm hmm. And I'm sure it was genius when they bought as well. Jeez.

The article is whatever - Being in the handset market is a business google doesn't want to be in short term or long term.

I argue that they are moving toward the connected aware home and devices that will make handsets obsolete - as well as the cost of dealing with the new radios that will come into play in hardware when GSM is decommissioned across the united states.

Then global export issues across handsets is a whole other thing.

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