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Was it botched? I'm not sure the intention was to ever run Motorola as a going concern. After selling the cable/home biz, cash on hand, deferred taxes, and selling the phone biz to Lenovo, they lost just $3.5B. But they kept all of the patents, defending Android from legal assaults into the future.

Pretty good deal IMO.

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Right, and they put out a generation of near-stock Android phones with the Moto E/G/X line that did a great job putting Android in as many hands as possible and setting the standard for low and mid range phones.

As they were doing that I remember thinking "these phones don't make much sense for Motorola in terms of generating a profit, but they make perfect sense for Google in terms of blanketing the world with Android phones."

I'd say Google was quite happy with what they were able to do while they had Motorola.

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