Many patent lawyers are engineers.
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...