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Google has announced through its official blog la acquisition of the Motorola Mobility division for $ 12.500 billion.
Motorola is one of the largest electronics companies in the United States, and it's doing quite well in the mobile phone market. What will happen after this merger? |
It will possibly be the strongest tech news of the year: Google just acquired Motorola Wireless for $ 12.500 billion. Motorola brought radio communications to the Moon in 1969 and four years later invented the cell phone, allowing it to dominate the market for two decades.
But the weather then changed. An unexpected Nokia emerged, displacing Motorola, and which in turn was dethroned by an even more unexpected Apple iPhone. And in this rarefied scenario Google entered with Android, an operating system for cell phones (smartphones, strictly speaking) that grew without stopping and already comfortably surpassed Apple; In the last quarter, 50% of the smartphones sold in the world used Android, compared to 20% of iOS, the iPhone system and the iPad.
In between, Motorola abandoned everything to also switch to Android and produced, almost out of nowhere, when everything indicated that its inventiveness was eclipsed, the excellent Milestone smartphones, called Droid in the United States.
Now, another huge and, to some extent, unexpected move: Google is staying with Motorola.
Why did Google buy Motorola?
These are the main reasons:
1. The search engine acquires Motorola's patents, some 17.000 globally, and in this way puts a stop to the various companies that, worried about Android, try to curb its growth with lawsuits.
Many of us are aware of the crossover of statements that existed a few days ago between Microsoft and Google (although Apple also came up). It was all due to alleged pressure that Apple and Microsoft were exerting on Google's mobile platform for patent use licenses. Larry Page has just recognized that this has been one of the main motivations when it comes to buying Motorola.
We recently explained how companies like Microsoft and Apple are coming together in common cause against anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The US Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of a recent patent auction to "protect competition and innovation in the open source software community" and is currently studying the results of Nortel's auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google's patent portfolio, which will allow us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.
2. Google needs a hardware division, whether it admits it or not. Its core business—software and advertising—is more lucrative than hardware, but also more volatile. Leveraging Motorola's engineering expertise and device manufacturing capabilities, Google is in a much stronger position than it is now.
Until now Google was quite tied up in the creation and development of hardware innovations, because in many cases it had to wait for the manufacturer to implement this new technology in their devices (in the case of NFC). With the purchase of Motorola, this company will become a standard bearer or precursor of all the others, incorporating much more advanced technology that will drive the adoption of the rest. At the same time, and from a software point of view, the purchase will also force the remaining manufacturers to catch up sooner when OS updates emerge, knowing that Motorola will be among the first to offer them.
3. Google already tried to make its own smartphones—the Nexus line—and it didn't go well, not because they were bad devices, quite the opposite. It failed because it doesn't understand the mobile phone business. Motorola will bring its nearly forty years of experience in this field.
4. Perhaps most importantly, Google now finds itself in a completely new position on the complex battleground where it competes with Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. Its already proven ability to entice users with services will now be reinforced by a hardware division, and this is more than its opponents can currently claim.
5. The remaining question is whether the search engine will respect Motorola's culture or try to inject its own very different way of thinking. If it does the latter, it will only acquire a package of patents. But if, instead, it allows Motorola to continue doing what it does best—telecommunications engineering—it may have pulled an ace out of its sleeve.