Disqus
When Google announced their intent to purchase Motorola Mobility on August 15th for $12.5 billion, the entire industry ground to a halt and we all just sort of looked at each other, asking if what just happened actually happened? Google says it’s all about patents, that they’d never enter the hardware business, but let’s be serious, we have no idea what the people in charge have in store for us. Now Motorola Mobility is not a small company, they’ve got roughly 19,000 employees. To put that into some perspective, Google has about 30,000 brianacs all over the world. How exactly does one integrate two companies that are that massive? The simple answer is that you start to look for people who are “redundant”, which is a stone cold way of saying “the guy who is no longer needed because the company doing the takeover already has a guy with the exact same responsibilities”. According to BusinessWeek, Motorola Mobility will let go of 800 such people. What really stinks is that we’re absolutely positive this will only be the first of many such announcements.
Anyway, once the deal is approved, which we think will happen by the end of the year, here’s what we want to see happen: Google announces that they’re going to work in conjunction with Motorla to design reference platforms. Other companies will be free to use said platforms, but they have to agree to play by Google’s rules, which means stock Android. Motorola’s consumer facing brand lives, but Google announces that all the revenue made the Motorola division will be used to subsidize the best Android partners, allowing them to make even better hardware than they’re currently producing. Google has the hard task of proving to the Android ecosystem that the Motorola buy isn’t going to screw everyone over.
How they’ll do that … we have no idea.
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
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Jaime Ramirez
