3 ms·
I'll take "Acquisitions that Google ran into the ground" for $800, Alex. Answer: They used to be the leading restaurant review book, pre-internet. Google bough
by Cupertino95014 5y ago
I'll take "Acquisitions that Google ran into the ground" for $800, Alex.
Answer: They used to be the leading restaurant review book, pre-internet. Google bought it in 2011, and has now sold it off.
Question: what is Zagat?
Let's continue for $1,000.
Answer: This Schaumburg, IL company was a pioneer in electronics before the smartphone era. Google paid $12.5 billion for a division of it in 2012, and has now sold it off.
Question: What is Motorola?
- rchaud 5y agoThey bought Motorola for the patents IIRC. Those weren't transferred when they sold it to Lenovo.
- AlbertCory 5y agoYou do remember correctly. I was in Google Patent Litigation then. The patents were never asserted against anyone. Were they useful as leverage in cross-licensing deals? No, not particularly. Since patent infringement suits are generally brought against the final manufacturer of the hardware, what this did is make Google the defendant in a lot of lawsuits against Motorola. I personally looked over all 20K+ Google patents (mostly via our summary tools, not reading every word). Most of the Motorola ones were utterly worthless.
- the-rc 5y agoWasn't the interlaced video patent asserted against Microsoft, along with a bunch of other H264 stuff?
- Cupertino95014 5y agoWas it? When was that?
- the-rc 5y ago2012: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/courts-will-decide-how-much-patent-cash-motorola-gets-from-microsof/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/courts-will-deci...
- Cupertino95014 5y agoThanks, good catch. So Motorola had a SEP (standards-essential patent). I don't remember anyone ever talking about that, but that's probably my bad.
- rchaud 5y agoWouldn't Motorola have a lot of patents related to networking and telecoms infrastructure? Similar to what companies like Nokia and Ericsson had? Wouldn't those be valuable for Google to hang on to?
- andrewl-hn 5y agoThe silliest thing was that they sold phone manufacturing branch to Lenovo only to decide they want to build phones in-house, and they bought a phone division from HTC in 2017.