Google decided to acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion. Now as we all know by now that this is a huge news. This will make the smart phone competition more interesting and challenging. This is the clear indication that now Google is making itself more stronger and this deal will bring Google in direct competition with Apple. So far Apple is the only company that makes both the mobile software and the hardware, and now Google will do the same once this deal will be done sometime by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
In the war of the patents Google has been a loser and this seems to be the revenge of Larry Page. Google did not did well and was not able to capture what it was looking for during the Nortel patent saga. With this deal Google got 17,000 Motorola patents plus 7000 Motorola patents which are in the pipeline, making it a total of around 24,000 patents. I believe Google is smart enough to spend it cash wisely and to me they are not after the patents, may be they are, but to me it is more of a strategic deal. I am not an expert here but to me 24,000 patents for $12.5 billion is a not such a good deal. What worries me as of now is that with this deal Google got an additional of 19,000 Motorola employees and their current strenght is 29,000 which is like 60% increase in the workforce of Google. I am sure Larry have had that in mind before he proceed to make this deal. There are some serious questions for the leadership and mangement teams at Google on how they plan to manage such a massive work force? Google has been a software company for all these years and now with this deal it is entering the hardware market which could become another challenging job for the search giant. Out an out this has been an intresting move by Google and will surely proliferate the unstoppable Android and its followers and we see get a huge spike in the mobile operating system. To get more details on this deal read Larry’s blog here.
Not sure what will be Apple’s reaction on this one, but I guess it will not do much about it. Time for Microsoft to make a move and buy Nokia. I was pretty sure that Microsoft will buy Nokia sometime this year but I have never imagined that Google will make a first move. Anyway I guess it is never too late for Microsoft to add the dying Nokia into its family.
With this deal the smart phone war has become pretty sweet and of course fun to watch. I know I said that before and I guess I will keep saying that as there is still lot more to come.
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