Google announced their intent to buy Motorola Mobility in August 2011. It took nine months for the deal to close, but it’s finally done. Brad Stone and Peter Burrows published an article in Bloomberg Businessweek that’s a must read if you’re interested in the background of this major acquisition and want to know why it’s important. The piece is three pages long, which might turn some of you off, so here are some of the highlights:
“Apple CEO Tim Cook had been trying to poach Woodside [the new CEO of Motorola Mobility] to make him Apple’s head of sales, but Google had convinced Woodside to stay, in part by promising him greater responsibility at the search company.”
“Woodside quietly assembled a new senior team, which will be primarily based at Motorola’s offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., a few miles from the Googleplex.”
“Regina Dugan, former head of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will run a new Motorola research and development lab called the Advanced Technology and Projects Group. ATAP will be modeled on DARPA and will seek to identify, invest in, and develop breakthrough mobile technologies that can be quickly integrated into Motorola products. “We are going to build a small, lean, Skunkworks-like group that is not afraid of failure,” says Dugan, an expert at developing technologies to detect land mines.”
“Jha [the former CEO of Motorola Mobility] had to persuade his board of directors not to shut down the phone unit altogether, an internal battle he calls “the darkest hour for our business.””
“The $12.5 billion deal [between these two companies], says the person, was done in five days.”
“Google also recently acquired a San Francisco-based industrial design firm, Mike and Maaike, which worked on the first Google Nexus phone, Bloomberg Businessweek has learned.”
You got all that? Apple’s been trying to hire the guy who is now the CEO of Motorola Mobility. This new CEO put together a senior team that will be located in an office just miles away from Google’s Headquarters. Motorola Mobility will also have a new R&D lab headed by someone who used to be a in charge of DARPA. Motorola Mobility’s ex-CEO says the company almost decided to stop making phones at one point. The deal between Google and Motorola Mobility took less than a week to draft up and sign. And finally, Google bought a design firm called Mike and Maaike, who were responsible for the G1 and partly responsible for the design of the XBOX 360.
If you’re not excited about the future of Android, you don’t have a pulse.