Seems like the best jobs at Google will soon be the lawyers, not the engineers.
They get patents and a manufacturing arm (which then gives them control of the entire product cycle for Android).
The latter is a logical move; a lot of Apple's success comes from controlling all aspects of the iPhone. I know Android is open software, but internally for Google it makes sense to drive product development from the hardware side too.
Google's been promoting the "top end phone with fast updates" with their Nexus line which makes me wonder if Motorola-manufactured Androids are all going to be top of the line models.
Thew droid felt defunct somewhere in the middle of last year (and thus I upgraded), but my iPhone still feels awesome, even though I know positively that I am holding out an upgrade till iPhone 5 in a few months.
I've never really considered it from that perspective before... but nevertheless interesting. There is possibly something there that Android needs to look into.
It's fascinating to me to see this shift, which Google seems to be leading, from tech companies fighting over new product development - and spending gobs of cash on it - to something entirely different: fighting over patents (and again, spending gobs of cash on it). Where a company spends its cash is a good measure of where its priorities are, and I'm not sure what that says about Google.
I thought it was Microsoft and Apple that were aggressively filing patent lawsuits, and Google and other Android partners were on the receiving end, no?
One other thing I don't see being mentioned anywhere in these threads is that, "Motorola Mobility held $5.5B in cash and deferred tax assets; this could put Google's (GOOG) real purchase price around $7B."[1]
[1]http://seekingalpha.com/article/278932-can-motorola-mobility...