Guns, Cars, and Tech

Guess they decided they DID need to play

Written by

wizardpc

in

,

Google has announced that it will buy Motorola’s cell phone division for $12.5 billion.

Most people don’t know this, but over the last few months there has been a bit of a war going on between the largest tech companies in the world. Patents are the weapons*, and Google didn’t have any. Now they have 17,000 of them.

*Basically this was mutually assured destruction. Company A has 200 patents, and Company B has 300 patents. Both A & B make phones that have features that infringe on on or more of the other’s patents. Instead of suing each other out of existence, A & B just decide to engage in reciprocity. This worked well until Android became successful and started eating in to Apple’s marketshare. Apple fired the first shots at Samsung earlier this year and it’s been crazy ever since.

Comments

3 responses to “Guess they decided they DID need to play”

  1. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    Best part is, MS owns patents that both Apple and Android use 😀

    Reply
  2. Jake Avatar
    Jake

    And HP (through its acquisition of Palm) owns patents that MS, Apple, and Android all use. And vice-versa, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

    It’s a mess. Just straightening out who really owns what and which patents should never have been granted is going to be a Sisyphean task. Everybody in the smartphone business has stolen somebody else’s ideas, going back decades. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some ideas have even been stolen back without the company realizing it had originally been their own idea in the first place!

    Reply
  3. Enjay Avatar
    Enjay

    Motorola has been trying to sell the cellular division since before I worked there (1997-2001). Their first idea was to offer it to Nokia, who at the time was the market leader. Nokia said “HAHAHAHA! No.” Siemans, the company who made the machines they used to make the boards, was very interested for quite a while, but ultimately decided that Motorola didn’t have the market share that they wanted for the price that was being quoted to them. I lost interest what Motorola was doing when they laid off North American manufacturing and shipped the jobs overseas.

    Reply

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