Sometimes, the other shoe takes a while to drop. In this case, two years and twelve days. That’s the interval between Eric Schmidt’s resignation from the board of Apple and the proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google. It has been a period of intense competition, hypergrowth, and two very different business models. As Kevin Tofel writes for GigaOm, control, ahem, integration between hardware, software, and ecosystem is now the common trait of the dominant mobile platforms. Motorola Mobility has been receding in the overall handset market since 2004, when it got a nice bump from the RAZR. But the venerable brand is an Android-only player in smartphones, unlike fast-growing Samsung, which sells on multiple platforms. While that niche gives Motorola the advantage of focus, it has not been enough to earn the company a spot on IDC’s most recent list of the top smart phone vendors.
Motorola Mobility, with its 19,000 employees, will become a part of Google’s search business. These recent comments (via TechCrunch) from Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, give us a window into how Google views mobility.
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Larry Page’s blog on the deal is a good-read, too, and it makes me think that one of the most common sidebars on this deal has legs: the importance of patents. Page cites Motorola’s 80 years of communications experience and intellectual property as a major reason for the deal. It’s a reminder that there is one thing that Google’s brilliant engineers can’t do: go back in time and establish prior art in this increasingly litigious area. Microsoft, not exactly a rising star in mobility, has been aggressively targeting Android handset makers with patent infringement cases. It looks like Google has reloaded. A year from now, we’ll remember this deal for several reasons. First, it gave the financial markets a boost, as big deals almost always do in volatile times. (That said, Google’s second largest deal, its acquisition of Doubleclick, was announced in April 2007, when the S&P was closing in its all time high). We’ll also probably be likely to say that it marked the beginning of the end for some struggling competitors. And it will most certainly force any company that has seen its future in the dramatic shift to mobile computing to redraw its map of he world.
