Look for a Google TV ad in the not so distant future of an auditorium with a large screen on the stage and an audience full of mesmorized clones staring at the screen, when a Google employee in a running outfit runs down the aisle and throws a large sledgehammer into the TV screen’s face of Steve Jobs
Yesterday, Google announced it is buying the Mobile Phone business of Motorola for a bit over $12 billion At this point, Motorola is a non-player in the Cell Phone market (my first cell phone was an employer provided Motorola pone in about 2000 that was horrible and a large part of why I chose not to own a cell phone until 2 years ago)
So Google tried to get into the retail cell phone business and failed miserably, barely making a dent – since Google has no clue about running a retail distribution network. What would motivate Google to spend such a huge chunk of change on an almost defunct mobile cell phone maker? One word: Patents.
Google is positioning itself as the anti-iPhone software maker. The Android operating system is optimized to run on cell phones. In contrast to Apple’s closed archictecture and tight control of every aspect of the product including distribution, Google is the Open cell phone architecture. In the words of Steve Jobs “If you want to porn on your cell phone, buy an Android phone”. Google knows much more about its customers than Apple.
The biggest weapon Apple has against the Google Fall Phone Revolution is to tie up Google in patent litigation, asserting that Android is violating patents owned by Apple. By buying up patents from Motorola that go back to the earliest days of portable phones, Google can prevent that kind of attack, or countersue and tie up Apple in knots. More than likely, the long term objective is Google were seek a cross-licensing deal with both companies agree to allow each other to use the other company’s patents and declare a truce.
Congress really needs to go back and revisit Patent law. When the Founding Fathers put Issuing Patents into the Constitution as a purpose of the Federal Government, I don’t think they had in mind protecting the abstract features of devices run by computer software in order to limit future innovation for generations (ot to force it to move to other countries to avoid fighting the wars).
Some of this stuff is just a little too far over my personal expertise horizon to understand it fully. But that does not ameliorate my gut-level distrust of GOOGLE. I go to lengths to avoid using GOOGLE and “contracting” their tracking cookies and God knows what else. My heart, for the moment, is with Apple.