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They likely want to get Motorola's house in order first and make sure they have the product people necessary to make a great device, before they entrust them wi
by redthrowaway 14y ago
They likely want to get Motorola's house in order first and make sure they have the product people necessary to make a great device, before they entrust them with doing so. Worse than Moto being a loss leader for a few quarters would be a $12B acquisition falling flat with its first major release.
- zmmmmm 14y agoMy personal theory / guess (and let's face it, we're all guessing) is that Google doesn't particularly want motorola for phones at all. I think they've decided they need an in-house capability to produce hardware in general and they intend to suck all the juice out of Motorola and then discard its corpse so that they have the ongoing ability to invest in R&D for hardware like Google Glass, self driving cars, etc. Just like they decided years in advance of needing it that they had to have a mobile OS in their arsenal, they've now decided that strategically they have to be able to produce hardware. Not because they want to but because there are strategic initiatives they can't pursue without that. Think of it as the biggest acqhire in history (+ a boat load of patents, of course).
- redthrowaway 14y agoThat's certainly possible, but I still think they intend to make Motorola a maker of vanilla Android phones, to pressure the other OEMs to either improve or ditch their "differentiating" skins and the like, as well as to provide a reasonable baseline upgrade path. I'll admit that a part of me simply wants Google to make Motorola the company that produces true iPhone competitors, but I also don't think it unrealistic to imagine that they'll use the resource as a way to drive the rest of the ecosystem forward, while hopefully making money with great products at the same time.