Google acquired Motorola this year for several billion dollars and many people said that the entire acquisition was based on Motorola's patent portfolio. Although Google denied this, one of the company's managers confirmed it in an interview for New York Times that this is true. The truth is that Google continued to manufacture Nexus series terminals with other manufacturers and not with Motorola, and the reason behind this decision is clear.
The way I understand it is, it's mostly about the patents, the way you can sort of disarm this huge attack against Android. We talked about prices. There are players in the industry who were unhappy about more competitive pricing for the consumers. They want to keep the prices high, they want to force the price to be so high that operators have to subsidize the devices very highly. That's not only the Cupertino guys but also for the guys up in Seattle. They want higher margins, they want to charge more for software.
Basically, Google wanted to have a shield against the attack launched by Apple and Microsoft against Android, and investing several billion dollars in Motorola seems to have been the right decision in the end. For Google, the money spent on Motorola does not mean much, but what Motorola's patents offer them is extremely important, because through them Apple, Microsoft and other companies can be attacked and counter-attacked in courts around the world.
We simply believe there's a better way of doing it without extracting that much payment from end users, because there are other ways to drive revenues. Patents were used as a weapon to try to stop that evolution and scare people away from lower-cost alternatives. And I think with the Motorola acquisition we've shown we're able to put skin in the game and push back.
