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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 companies in the United States when it comes to electronic devices, and it does not badly in the world of telephony. What will happen after this union? |
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 brake on the various companies that, concerned about Android, try to restrain 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 arm, whether it supports it or not. Your business, software and advertising, is more lucrative than metal, but also more volatile. With Motorola's engineering culture and its ability to make devices, Google is in a much more robust position than it is today.
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 has already tried to make its own smartphones - the Nexus - and it did badly, not because they were bad equipment, quite the contrary. It was bad for him because he doesn't know the cellular business Motorola will bring you its nearly forty years of experience in this field.
4.- Perhaps most importantly, Google now places itself in a completely new position on the complex battlefront in which it competes simultaneously with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. His proven ability to seduce with services will now be reinforced with a hardware division, and this is more than his opponents can say at the moment.
5.- The question that remains to be answered is whether the search engine will respect Motorola's culture or whether it will try to inject its own very different way of thinking. If you do this, you will only acquire one patent package. But if, instead, it allows Motorola to continue to do what it does best, namely telecommunications engineering, it could have pulled an ace up its sleeve.