Google Shakes Up the Smartphone Market by Buying Motorola Mobility Discussion

[Ed Hardy]

Google is buying Motorola Mobility, the maker of some of the most popular smartphones running the Android OS, including the Droid line. Motorola Mobility will be run as a separate company which will keep its own name.

Read the full content of this Article: Google Shakes Up the Smartphone Market by Buying Motorola Mobility

Related Articles:

• Motorola Droid 3 Review: Ready for Business or Pleasure
• Motorola XPRT Review: Looks Like a BlackBerry, Acts Like a Droid
• Motorola Droid X2 Review: Raw Power

[LandSurveyor]

Nokia and MS were what I thought of when this came up. Imagine how other vendors felt when MS gave Nokia "most favored nation" status, complete with the ability to mess with WP7. Now Google will potentially be doing the same thing. How can this not be anti-competitive?

On the bright side, maybe Moto will scrap all -Blur stuff and start making plain-vanilla Android devices. Or at least some, if not all of their product line.

[Hook]

The other interesting aspect is that, with Google in charge of Droids, it kind of puts them in an implicit partnership with Verizon.

[LandSurveyor]

I don't like the way this is looking ..........

[LandSurveyor]

There's some good thoughts here. I hope this will indeed get merged with the thread Ed just started.

[Hook]

Some other interesting reverberations:

Nokia Jumps on Google-Motorola Deal - Bloomberg

[Hook]

All we need is for Samsung to grab WebOS and HTC is suddenly like the guy at the cake walk who didn't grab a chair.

[hal]

Very relevant, Ed. I read the news early this morning and I was wondering about the events to follow. My curiosity drifts in particular toward that, AFAIK, this is the first Google takeover of a manufacturing corporate. What are the success expectations of a software model & clouded driven corporation, when operating a very tangible asset? Besides, owning a manufacturer that creates hardware running Android, now places Google in a similar stance as the one Palm had over a decade ago. Will it be prone to suffering the same illnesses as Palm, specifically regarding this stance?

Besides the global effect of this takeover, I am wondering on more local views. Mexico has recently been addressed as the biggest cellphone exporter. In a sideline, there is no Mexican brand manufacturing cellphones, but rather an enormous installation of DFI (Direct Foreign Investment). Whenever you people at the US wonder "now where did our digital tech jobs go?", the reply is not only China. It's also Mexico. No hard feelings I hope . Even though Motorola Mobility was split on arguments of poor ROI, it is still a billion-size business. Most Motos are built in Mexico, and the local facilities, being the biggest one established in Ocotlán, Jalisco, praise themselves with say 15 high tech certifications and a very thin recruiting mesh for qualified laboring hand and engineering (and BTW even recruiting interviews are covered by an NDA). Most probably, this side of Motorola Inc. business was left to Moto Mobility. So, in my individual view, this is more than a distant milestone in the digital tech world.

[Ed Hardy]

The is the topic of my latest blog post on Brighthand Bytes:

Google shocked the tech world today by announcing that it’s going to acquire Motorola Mobility, the company behind some of the most popular devices running Google’s Android OS. This has left many people wondering what this means — Is Google going into the hardware business? Is it going to block Samsung and HTC from making Android devices?

Read the full text of this post at:

Google Acquiring Motorola: It’s All About Patents

[Varjak]

Hal, isn't Foxconn building a huge facility in Mexico (in the Maquilladora area)?

Good call Ed Hardy. I couldn't quite understand why Google bought Moto, until you brought up the patent thing. That makes more sense, because I see more downside for Google as a hardware manufacturer than upside. (commodification, alienating Samsung and HTC, 'owning' any poor results of combining hardware and software, etc.).