Nate Bird

Google buys Motorola Mobility

For 12 Billion dollars! (In Dr. Evil’s voice). Here are the interesting parts of the blog post.

In 2008, Motorola bet big on Android as the sole operating system across all of its smartphone devices. It was a smart bet and we’re thrilled at the success they’ve achieved so far.

I’m not sure how Larry Page measures success but Motorola has been anything but successful. This deal was good timing as Motorola has become just another Android vendor - one that can’t even squeeze a profit out of a handset with free (as in beer) licensing.

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.

There are a lot of things wrong with this. As Horace Dediu at Asymco points out, this strategy has turned out bad for everyone involved. So why did Google purchase Motorola if they plan on keeping everything a level playing field with their Android partners? The next paragraph contains the answer.

We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android… Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

Yep. Patent protection. And Google said that paying 4.5 billion for Nortel’s patents was too high. They just paid 12 billion for Motorola’s patent portfolio. Sure they gain some manufacturing capabilities but that is actually a negative as they haven’t realized a profit in 4 years and are trending downward. So Google is actually paying more than 12 billion for the patents because they now have to subsidize Motorola’s failing hardware business.

Flash 10.3 Beta

Then there’s Flash. Yes, the TouchPad comes with Adobe Flash built in. You can set Flash to load automatically in the browser, or load when you tap. I don’t really have much to report about Flash on the TouchPad that you haven’t read somewhere else in the context of an Android tablet: the performance isn’t very impressive. When I connected to MLB.com’s Flash-based video stream of a live baseball game, the TouchPad managed to play about four frames per second, and it was difficult to get it to respond to my touches to pause the stream. I tried to play the Flash-based Lexulous game on Facebook, but was completely unable to move my tiles onto the board. A visit to ESPN.com loaded a Flash ad that played so slowly that it basically locked up the browser. So: I can confirm that Flash runs on the TouchPad, but I can’t confirm that it runs well.

So Flash has been on mobile devices as a beta for over a year and we’ve seen 10.1, 10.2, and now 10.3. Performance still sucks and Flash as a platform is a big security risk. Hmm… is anyone still wondering why Apple doesn’t want this garbage on their products?